This book was unexpectedly life-changing! The author is very conversational, relatable, and down-to-earth. I wouldn’t call this a self-help book; rather, this is an inspiring story with life lessons that anyone can apply to their life. This entire story really made me think about letting things go in my own life, and living in a way so that I would have fewer regrets and burdens in that way. I did not expect to get much out of this going into it, but I was so pleasantly surprised with the story and topics that I read about. I loved this book - it was inspiring and helped me look at my life in a refreshing way. I recommend it to everyone!

“How to Host a Viking Funeral: The Case for Burning Your Regrets, Chasing Your Crazy Ideas, and Becoming the Person You’re Meant to Be”

By Kyle Scheele

Forget Your Remorses with a Fiery Farewell

Artist and Motivational Speaker Kyle Scheele approached the milestone age of 30 with a certain amount of trepidation that resulted in deep self-reflection on his personal goals, accomplishments, aspirations, and disappointments that he experienced over the past three decades of his life.

In Scheele’s encouraging book, “How to Host a Viking Funeral,” he explains how instead of a 30th birthday bash, he invited guests to help him set fire to a 16-foot cardboard Viking longship he designed and built. Rather than a deceased high-ranking Viking war lord’s body, this dragon boat contained written notes containing Scheele’s many regrets from his earlier years.

As pictures and stories of Scheele’s Viking Funeral went viral on social media, he received thousands of regret messages from fans and followers requesting a fiery grave for theirs. Sheele’s heart-felt book contains numerous photos of some of these personal notes. These notes are one of my favorite parts of the book because they pull at my heart.

Although the title, “How to Host a Viking Funeral,” may sound moribund, it’s an optimistic book about letting go of the past and making today a better place to live.

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The Book Maven’s Journal—Reviews for Word Connoisseurs

STAR RATING ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Title: “How to Host a Viking Funeral”
Author: Kyle Scheele
Genre: Non-Fiction (Adult) | Self-help |
Publication Date: 08 February 2022
Publisher: HarperOne

Sincere thanks and appreciation go to NetGalley, Author Kyle Scheele, and Publisher HarperOne for this Advance Reader’s Copy (ARC) for review.

How to Host a Viking Funeral: The Case for Burning Your Regrets, Chasing Your Crazy Ideas, and Becoming the Person You're Meant to Be</a> was available on Netgalley, I was immediately intrigued. A traditional Viking funeral normally involved the burning of a deceased individual and their most prized processions. However, in this case, the Viking funeral was about burning the past and accepting the future. It started when the author <strong>Kyle Scheele</strong> was getting ready to celebrate his 30th birthday and decided he wanted a Viking funeral theme. He built a cardboard ship that was sixteen feet long and set it a flame with items from his past. After a video of this unusual birthday celebration went viral, a plan was put into motion to do a second Viking funeral where anyone from around the world could submit their regrets and memories to be burned. This book is the reflection of that project.

Kyle Scheele is a motivational speaker by trade and you can definitely tell this as you are reading along. He is also a cardboard artist and loves creating outlandish projects to make people laugh. This second Viking ship was one of the most outlandish projects he had ever done. When he had asked people to submit notecards with their regrets, he really didn't know what to expect. By the end, he had 21,000 index cards from around the world, with varying levels of regret waiting to be burned.

This book is part memoir and part inspiration. You are taken on the journey of the ship being constructed and the various failures that occur along the way. The author takes each failure as a lesson and uses it to further promote his idea of letting go of regrets. He breaks the experiences he goes through into themes and also uses these themes for the index cards he received. These themes included terms such as fears, identities, and beliefs. The themes are also used to reflect experiences from the authors life. </p>
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For the most part, I enjoyed How to Host a Viking Funeral: The Case for Burning Your Regrets, Chasing Your Crazy Ideas, and Becoming the Person You're Meant to Be. It was a creative way to look at regrets and how to let them go and look more into the future. There is several moments of positive insight that will leave you reflecting on the way you view your own life and regrets. However, l did find it a bit repetitive at times, and slightly disorganized. It did come back to the original theme but, I think things could have been put in a more cohesive manner. The whole project is interesting to read though. I could never imagine trying to build my own 16 plus foot cardboard Viking ship!

How to Host a Viking Funeral by Kyle Scheele gives a big dose of humor and a heartfelt hug to the difficult topic of regret. After giving a Viking funeral to his twenties, Kyle asked what would others want to give a funeral for? What are the things people are generally holding on to and would want to release?

I enjoyed this book immensely, especially the details of the boat build, collecting people's stories, and the general hijinks Kyle gets into. When things are constantly far too serious, this book was a great reason to laugh and to dream a little.

Side note: What if there was a Viking funeral for the Age of Covid? Build another boat, people share their stories and release the fear, the conflict, and the trauma?

What a beautiful idea.

How to Host a Viking Funeral by Kyle Scheele is the story of a motivational speaker and his experimental project combining the regrets of others around the world with ...cardboard. The unlikely duo creates a unique testimony to the human experience in relation to the fears/setbacks they experience. The beginning of this project starts with Kyle and his mini version of the cardboard Viking funeral for a birthday celebration, which gains traction locally, and gives him the idea to recreate the project on a much (MUCH) larger scale. The rest of the book follows the unexpected trials and tribulations he faces along the way, while also making connections between the experience and the regrets he receives from his participants around the world. Scheele does an excellent job of cutting these occasionally ruinous trials with humor to keep the reading light and uplifting.

The book bounces back and forth in time, in a way that can be confusing if not paying proper attention. I don't disagree with the way it was written, however. I feel that the chosen timeline is intentional, just something to keep in mind when reading for the first time.

I feel that the people that would benefit the most from this read are young creatives. Not necessarily young in age, but young in their career/journey as an artist. This book follows Scheels' fears and regrets as a creative being, along with what did and what didn't work that readers can apply to their own craft. If any of these things interest or apply to you, I would definitely give this book a read.

I enjoyed this book because of it's writing style, unique topic, and the fact that it really provided a thought-provoking experience. Recommended for readers who want to read slowly so as to take time to process.

I ran across Kyle Scheele on TikTok a few months ago, and when I heard him talk about this project and the process of writing this book, I immediately made my way to NetGalley to request a copy. It sounded like exactly the kind of thing I’d want to read.

I don’t think I knew what I was getting myself into, because this book was different than I anticipated, but in the best way possible.

For his 30th birthday, motivational speaker and cardboard artist (among other titles) built a ship out of cardboard and held a viking funeral to mourn the loss of his 20s. His friends filmed it, and Scheele made a comment about having to let go of things from the past to make room for things moving forward. Word of the project got around, and after quite a few people reached out to him with sentiments along the lines of “you’ve helped me let go of [fill in the blank], but I wish I could have done it with a viking funeral,” Scheele decided to replicate the project.

Two and a half years later, Scheele held a second viking funeral, this time with a 16’x30’ ship, and including more than 20,000 submissions from people around the world about things they wanted to let go of. Scheele read and cataloged the submissions as he received them, and found that most of the things that people wanted to leave in the past fell into five categories: beliefs, relationships, identity, experiences, and fears.

How to Host a Viking Funeral is equal parts memoir, humor, and inspiration. Scheele has written the most (unintentionally?) Acceptance and Commitment Therapy-aligned book I’ve probably ever read, and at several points throughout the book, I found myself having to remind myself that Scheele is not a) a therapist or b) Russ Harris (though they should probably be friends). I am a therapist, and while I didn’t pick this book up as a resource to share with clients, I found myself highlighting entire passages, and will probably use things from this in therapy sessions because it all just felt so human and universal.

Though Scheele remarks during the book that he’s never been formally diagnosed with ADHD, as someone with ADHD (no diagnosing here, I promise), I’d like to claim him as one of our own. This book spoke so well to the difficulties and triumphs of the ADHD creative process ( though I’m sure it will also speak to other creatives as well). I also think this book will speak personally to people in periods of transition and to fans of Russ Harris and Brene Brown's work.

Whether you’ve been following Scheele since before this project, or, like me, recently stumbled across him on social media, I think there’s something in this book for just about everyone. After the last two years, I know I’ve been thinking a lot about the things I want to take with me when we exit this pandemic, and the parts of who I used to be that I’m planning to leave behind.

Thanks to Netgalley and Harperone for an advanced digital copy of this book to review. All opinions are my own.

I absolutely loved this book. Prior to reading, I’ve never heard of Kyle as a speaker nor his Viking funeral project for the public. I liked that he honed in on reoccurring themes to show that everyone is grappling with the same things, but what makes every journey unique is the person. Kyle really demonstrated that letting go, not dwelling, and freeing yourself of self imposed shackles is both a liberating and grieving process. I haven’t read any other book that embraces both, liberation and grief, in such a way that he has, it really drove home the communal and personal human experience all as a complete package.

I started off loving this book and loving the authorial "voice" but as time went on, I grew less and less enthusiastic about the book and my interest waned. It was a beautiful premise and he has a powerful voice, and is a very talented writer.

But, for me, my initial excitement started wearing off as time went on. I love the idea, but perhaps didn't end up loving the book quite as much as I had hoped.

As a certified integrative life and wellness coach, I was hoping this book would be inspirational and insightful. As a woman in her 40s, I realized I probably wasn't Scheele's target audience. While the premise and approach are certainly unique, rather than delivering on its promise of making a case to help others become "the person you're meant to be," this book comes across as self-indulgent, navel-gazing, and slightly immature. There is a chapter titled "What If Nobody Cares?" and by the time I reached that point in the book, I didn't. Readers seeking relatable personal growth memoirs can do much better.

I received a digital pre-publication copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Loved this book so much! The idea, the involvement, the roadblocks all make for an amazing story. However it’s the purpose behind the story that is the true hero here.

Kyle Scheele is creative. He's so creative, some have described him as an "artist"--"cardboard artist" to be more specific.

When I turned 30, I went out and mourned my lost 20s, the career paths I hadn't followed, the friends I'd lost track of, the two tiny kids who would dominate the direction of my 30s.

When Kyle turned 30, he made a Viking ship out of cardboard and burned it down, along with the rest of the regrets and successes of the decade behind him.

And as he grew his career as a motivational speaker, appealing to young people, he realized that his audience didn't have to wait until we're 30 to have regrets. He told them to write their regrets on white index cards and offered to build a new Viking ship, which would burn along with all of the regrets given him--a number which grew to over 20,000 individual notecards.

This book is partially about the 2 1/2-year quest to build Kyle's second Viking ship: the pitfalls and delays incumbent with assembling and hot-gluing a cardboard dragon ship 16 feet tall and 30 feet long.

The bulk of the book is about the regrets that Scheele collected as he built the ship. Broken into themes like "Fears," "Identifies," and "Beliefs," to name a few, the regrets lead Scheele naturally into accounts of his own life and experiences--the mishaps and blind alleys that didn't necessarily end when he burnt the first Viking ship on his 30th birthday. Some of the anecdotes come from those developed in his speeches featured on his web site. Others illustrate encounters at his speeches, bringing to life a handful of the people who submitted their regrets to be burned in his project. Ultimately the people feature more than the dragon in Scheele's recounting.

Scheele's insights are winsome, worth reading in snippets, worth later reflection.

I admit that I had a different book in mind altogether when I asked for this one from NetGalley, in exchange for writing an honest review. I had read several books this year about Vikings, and I thought this "how to" would make a nice addition to my brain.

I found something quite different when I read it, and I would recommend it to those who not only hold regrets but who also might appreciate one of the most creative ways I've seen of letting them go.

This was an interesting book and I really enjoyed it! What a cool concept and an inspiring book! I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is an interesting book.

It's a fun read! Scheele shares his experiences making a viking ship for his 30th birthday and then burning it. He also talks about other projects like building a dragon, working with cardboard, and other things he's taken on.

There's a lot of jumping around for my taste. It's not a linear memoir and there's things that are talked about and then elaborated on more later or referenced back to instead of all talked about together. The stories don't necessarily build on each other to tell a clear story. Also at the end of the day this is a book of Scheele talking about the cool things he does and the things his work makes him feel.

Overall the book is kind of inspiring, but also pretty high level. Despite the format and the inspirational tone, it's honestly just a fun read. I enjoyed hearing about Scheele's life and the things he does.

Scheele is a motivation speaker and cardboard artist who has somehow managed to ditch the suit-and-tie 9-to-5 life (a life few of us in the pre-pandemic world could ever change) and fill his life with crazy public art projects that make people laugh. As such, he’s like the modern-day reincarnation of Ken Kessey and the Merry Pranksters. So as his Twenties ended and Thirty loomed, he decided that, instead of a birthday cake and candles, he’d build an eight-foot cardboard Viking ship and have a funeral for his Twenties. After burning the ship, he then conceived of the idea (based on Internet reaction) for an even bigger cardboard Viking Ship to burn regrets and solicited regrets from the Internet, never realizing that like Pandora he was opening a box so big that it nearly had no end. Eventually, 21,000 index cards of regrets came in from the silly to the sublime, causing Scheele to ponder how much in the way of regrets people carried around with them and what it meant to release those regrets in a giant bonfire gone crazy. Part jokester material and part life-affirming self-help book, this is a hoot to read and there’s “no regurts” in spending the time to read this.