What’s Inspiring Me - My Friends: A Novel
October 2026
What I’m reading
My Friends: A Novel By Fredrik Backman
What's Inspiring Me: Who already sees the thing you're still hiding? What would you make if you let them push you?
What's Inspiring Me: My Friends.
He's fourteen. He lives in a harbor town that isn't kind to kids who don't fit.
Backman doesn't even give him a name for most of the book. He's just "the artist." At home he hears the same thing over and over. Just be normal. So he goes quiet. He avoids attention. He keeps the thing that makes him him tucked out of sight.
His friends see it anyway. Joar finds a notice for a painting competition and decides the artist is entering. He doesn't ask. He decides. Because Joar knows that without a shove, it will never happen. The people who love this kid most have to practically force him to do the thing he was born to do.
That's masking. We talk about it like it's armor against people who don't get us. It is. But the artist isn't hiding from enemies. He's hiding from the people who already know.
The mask doesn't check who's in the room. Once you learn your natural way of being is a problem, you hide it from everyone. The critics. The clients. The friends cheering the loudest.
Entrepreneurs do this with our work.
We show the tidy process, the one that looks like everyone else's. We hide the sideways, messy way we got there. That hidden part is usually the gift. The painting from that summer becomes one of the most famous in the world. It exists because three kids wouldn't let him keep hiding.
What's Inspiring Me: Who already sees the thing you're still hiding? What would you make if you let them push you?
