This won\u2019t be a normal book review.\u00a0 First of all, I haven\u2019t finished reading it yet.\u00a0 And it\u2019s way too soon to say exactly what results I\u2019ve achieved by using its advice because I really haven\u2019t used any yet.<\/p>\n
But what I can tell you is that the author, James Clear\u2019s explanation of his strategies to allow people to break bad habits and make good habits, jibes remarkably well with my long, very checkered career of developing better habits for just about every aspect of my life.\u00a0 It\u2019s as if this book was written specifically for people like me.\u00a0 And by people like me what I mean is extremely lazy people with an awful work ethic.<\/p>\n
There are chapters on the psychological and neurological origins of habit formation and there are rules for optimizing good habits and rules for minimizing the temptations of bad habits (which tend to be mirror images of each other).\u00a0 And there are checklists for scheduling all the good activities you will want to piggyback on each other in the course of your new, improved, productive but quite crowded day.<\/p>\n
The book doesn\u2019t have a large component of feel-good cheerleading.\u00a0 It\u2019s more of a how-to manual for maximizing success and minimize relapses.\u00a0 And it isn\u2019t one of those systems that depend on heroic willpower and any external products.\u00a0 He\u2019s not selling anything that I\u2019ve read about so far.\u00a0 It\u2019s logical strategies to manipulate human nature to direct effort and provide support for the natural power of repetition and the application of small incremental change over time.<\/p>\n
I think the reason I\u2019ve been enthusiastic about this book is because it formulates things, I\u2019ve already recognized about behavioral modification, but underpins it with explanations about what additional steps can be taken to protect against the everyday problems that so often derail people from making changes to their habits.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want to sound too enthusiastic about the usefulness of this book for everyone.\u00a0 Possibly I am the poster child for this book.\u00a0 Maybe most people don\u2019t need to know about dopamine in order to institute a permanent habit for exercise or rework their schedules.\u00a0 But for whatever reason this book clicks for me.\u00a0 If you\u2019re in a self-improvement mode and need a textbook to set it up this might be just what you need.\u00a0 It\u2019s probably in a library near you so you can check it out and see if it works for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This won\u2019t be a normal book review.\u00a0 First of all, I haven\u2019t finished reading it yet.\u00a0 And it\u2019s way too soon to say exactly what<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,237],"tags":[68,3841,38,1355,3842],"class_list":["post-21897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-reviews","tag-book-review","tag-habits","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-self-help"],"yoast_head":"\n