Unstuck

Aaron Pang is a Hong Kong-based author, TEDx and keynote speaker, personal coach, and host of the award-winning Transformative Purpose podcast. He spent his early career as a leader in a high-flying unicorn firm in Hong Kong before a series of personal crises – including episodes of Bell’s Palsy and a terrifying night in April 2019 when his three-month-old son stopped breathing and turned blue in his hands – forced him to reassess everything he thought he knew about success, meaning, and the purpose of adult life. He founded The Purpose Club and has since published eight books on the themes of personal growth, deliberate living, and transformative purpose.

Unstuck was the book that established Aaron Pang as one of Hong Kong’s most distinctive voices in personal development. The genesis was intensely personal, while the question the book answers is the one those crises forced him to ask: if the adult way of seeing the world is the problem, what would it feel like to see it like a child again?

The answer Aaron developed is a practice of getting to “kid height” – literally and philosophically. It involves interviewing extraordinary people on his podcast, kneeling down to engage with his own children, and systematically unwiring the autopilot responses that prevent most adults from asking better questions about their own lives. The book covers these practices with warmth, wit, and hard-won honesty. Michael Arnold edited the manuscript.

A personal development book earns its place on the shelf by making the reader feel understood before it makes them feel challenged. This one does both.

When kids are growing up, it can seem like adults know everything. Fast-forward through the pressures of work, the demands of parenthood, and the neuroses that everyday adult life brings, and it’s clear that most of us are making it up as we go along. The trap of adulthood – the fixed beliefs, the narrowing of possibility, the gradual forgetting of what it felt like to see the world without pre-judgement – is something most of us sense but few of us have a framework for escaping.

Unstuck is that framework. Drawing on Aaron Pang’s concept of Transformative Purpose – the convergence of doing what you love, becoming better at what you do, and inspiring others to become better together – the book teaches readers how to forgive their younger self, trust their current self, and create their future self, all while reclaiming the vision and enthusiasm that adulthood has buried. Grounded in Aaron’s interviews with extraordinary minds on his award-winning Transformative Purpose podcast and in his own experience of crisis and recovery, it is one of the most warmly reviewed personal development books to come out of Asia.

“If we can’t see, we can’t do. If we don’t unlearn, we can’t relearn new things. Humans have close to 100 billion neurons in our brain, all wired in different ways that make us truly unique. But if we don’t unwire ourselves, we can’t untangle those beliefs, biases and assumptions that no longer serve us well.”

“If you want to think, feel, or do things differently, try to become a kid again.”

— Aaron Pang, Unstuck