Book summaries are always appreciated, but I don’t understand your high praise of the book. I was disappointed with it for several reasons:
I wanted a book on how to change habits. In fact, my edition has the subtitle “Why we do what we do and how to change”. I didn’t really get much of that. There’s abstract theory and even seemingly concrete advice, but I never got said advice to work.
I hated the book’s structure, which required grinding through filler stories to get at interspersed facts. Most of these stories have hardly anything to do with habits.
To fit these stories into the book, the author uses terrible, strained metaphors like ‘social habits’ or ‘organizational habits’ over and over. The latter should have been left out. So I consider a huge chunk of the book to be useless.
Without all the waffling, the author could have made his points in half the space. Tangents lead to tangents-within-tangents. Low information density. Not zero, but low.
Personally I enjoyed stories and felt that even the “social habits” and “organizational habits” parts were interesting. Though it’s true that the stories led to a somewhat low information density, and that the social/organizational habits were actually a somewhat different topic from what the subtitle said.
Book summaries are always appreciated, but I don’t understand your high praise of the book. I was disappointed with it for several reasons:
I wanted a book on how to change habits. In fact, my edition has the subtitle “Why we do what we do and how to change”. I didn’t really get much of that. There’s abstract theory and even seemingly concrete advice, but I never got said advice to work.
I hated the book’s structure, which required grinding through filler stories to get at interspersed facts. Most of these stories have hardly anything to do with habits.
To fit these stories into the book, the author uses terrible, strained metaphors like ‘social habits’ or ‘organizational habits’ over and over. The latter should have been left out. So I consider a huge chunk of the book to be useless.
Without all the waffling, the author could have made his points in half the space. Tangents lead to tangents-within-tangents. Low information density. Not zero, but low.
Personally I enjoyed stories and felt that even the “social habits” and “organizational habits” parts were interesting. Though it’s true that the stories led to a somewhat low information density, and that the social/organizational habits were actually a somewhat different topic from what the subtitle said.
But I did find the advice on how to actually change habits to be useful, and feel like it was a major factor in helping bring my social media addiction under control.