Hey guys, welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast. Very excited to have you on board. Today is Five Minute Friday, and I’ve got an exciting book I’d like to share with you. Recently I just finished reading this book called The Five Love Languages. Amazing book, can’t wait to share with you, can’t wait to tell you a bit about it so that you can pick it up and learn a lot of [inaudible 00:00:30] for yourself.
So, first things first, it’s a very short book. It took me about five hours to read it and I’m quite a slow reader, so it’ll probably take you even less and you’ll read it faster. I read on the plane and it took me two flights and I was done. That’s a great advantage for any book, but the beauty of this book really and truly is how much value you get out of it. So the main reason why I wanted to share this video is because as soon as I finished it I was thinking to myself “Why didn’t anybody tell me about this 10 years ago,” and actually a lot of the examples, a lot of case studies that are in this book, people say exactly the same thing. Why didn’t anybody tell me about this 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, my life would have been so much more fulfilling, so much more exciting, and my relationships so much stronger and more interesting and fun.
So what is this book about? It’s not about data science, it’s not about analytics, it’s not about anything to do with data, it’s actually about relationships, whether those are intimate relationships with your significant other, or those relationships with friends and family or children, or parents and brothers and sisters, or just anybody else you know in life. Why is this a book that I would like to recommend to you on a data science podcast, on a data science channel? The reason for that is if your relationships are in order, if your relationships are fulfilling you’re gonna have a lot more energy and time and strength and excitement and passion to actually go and pursue your career, go and pursue things that you love doing in data science, in analytics, and any other area of life.
Because if you think about it, yes we can focus on our careers all the time and focus on learning the right tools and skills and learning more about data and reading data science books and so on, but ultimately if we’re struggling in one part of life, whether it’s relationships or any other part of life, then that’s gonna take away energy and time from the rest of our components of life including our career. Plus you’re not gonna be as fulfilled, and therefore you’re not gonna have as much energy and drive to pursue these other places. So that’s one of the reasons I picked up this book, and honestly I learned so much from here. I learned tips and ideas and just philosophies that I haven’t learned from probably, if I take all the other relationship books that I’ve read, maybe combined they would have given me as much value as I got from this book.
So let get to the contents of this book. What is this all about? This is about the five love languages, so what are they? Let’s just go through them. Words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch. Those, according to the author who is Gary Chapman, Gary Chapman is a doctor, I might be wrong on this one but I think he’s a doctor of psychology and he’s definitely a relationship, like a counselor and family counsel, marriage counselor, and through his practice, through years or decades of his practice he’s established what do people normally struggle with in relationship, and the most common thing that he’s seeing is that people speak different languages. When one person might be used to expressing their love in a certain way, for instance through words of affirmation, through saying nice things, saying kind things, complementing the other person.
At the same time, the other person in the relationship might be used to expressing love and therefore receiving love in, for example, quality time. If you spend time with them they feel loved. If you don’t spend time with them and you just give them words of affirmation they won’t feel loved, and therefore person A might be saying all the words of affirmation, all the great words in the world, but that is having zero to little effect on person B, and at the same time person B is expecting quality time which person A is not giving them, or vice versa. Person B is trying to spend a lot of quality time with person A, whereas person A is expecting their love language, is words of affirmation. So it kind of paints a picture. So words of affirmation, quality time, we talked about those.
Physical touch is like when you give your partner a massage or you pat them on the shoulder, or you hold their hand. Receiving gifts is pretty straightforward, when somebody buys you a gift or even just creates gifts with their hands, or write you a little note and passes it on to you, you might feel love there, and maybe you’re relating to that right now. Acts of service is when somebody does something for you, usually it’s unexpectedly or maybe [inaudible 00:05:13], like takes out the trash or cooks or vacuums the carpet, or I don’t know, washes the car. Things that you see physical activity that they’re performing that they’re expressing love in that way.
And so the problem is that in most relationships, statistically it’s very unlikely that people will have the same love language. Usually there’s two different love languages. One person has their top language is one and the other person has another, and therefore when they communicate, even though they want to express love, they don’t understand each other. So this book, very big eye opener, goes through each one of those love languages in detail, plus comments about the overall situation at the end as well. It really helps understand this, plus he has case studies, obviously anonymized case studies, but he walks through some of those examples that he’s seen, the author’s seen in his life, of his clients, and he explains exactly how those love languages play out.
So for me it’s been a big eye opener. I learned a lot about myself, I learned a lot about the people around me and now I notice these things when I’m interacting with people. So highly recommend checking it out. If you’re still on the fence after this rant that I gave about this book, if you’re still not sure if it’s gonna help your personal life and therefore as a consequence your professional life and every other aspect of your life, what I recommend doing is going onto fivelovelanguages.com, and they have an absolutely free test. This is how I got started. Somebody told me about this book and then I checked out their website and they have a test where you can discover your love language. It takes 10-15 minutes, there’s like 30 questions you need to answer, and it’ll tell you at the end, your love language is X, and when it told me mine, I was like whoa, that’s is so true, that is totally my love language. Spoiler alert, it’s acts of service, if you’re curious, and once it tells you you’ll probably see a reflection of yourself and that’ll give you some intrigue, which will further fuel you to go and pick this up and really empower your relationships.
So highly recommend checking it out, I want everybody watching or listening to this to have amazing relationships in life. Don’t put it off, don’t be like one of those people in this book who ends up saying why didn’t anybody tell me about this 40 years ago. Do it now, and enjoy, and let me know how you feel, what you find out about yourself in this book, and how transformative that’s going to be.
Alright, I’ll talk to you next time, and until then, happy analyzing.
