I have read a fair stack of the popular improvement books, enjoyed most of them, and can point to precisely nothing in my week that is different because of one. I am not looking for the best book, I am looking for one where a specific behaviour survived half a year. I will read one at a time and I would rather have one convincing answer than a list of ten. What changed, and what was still true six months on?
Atomic Habits, and I say that slightly grudgingly because the book is about 40 percent longer than its idea. The bit that survived was implementation intentions, meaning writing down the specific time and place a thing will happen instead of the intention to do it. Three years later I still schedule things as after I make coffee rather than in the morning, and my adherence on anything set up that way is dramatically better than anything I merely intended. The habit stacking and identity chapters did nothing for me at all.
Same single takeaway here, and I got it from a two page summary before I read the book. The book did not add much beyond examples.
One mechanism that survived out of a whole book is honestly what I was hoping to hear, rather than the book changed my life.
The one that changed a behaviour for me was a plain personal finance book about automating transfers rather than budgeting harder, and the behaviour that stuck was moving money on payday instead of at month end. Six years later it is still the only reason I have savings. For anything beyond mechanics I would talk to someone qualified rather than a book, but the mechanics genuinely are book sized.
I logged this because I got suspicious of my own answers. Forty three non-fiction books over three years, and by my own honest audit three of them left a behaviour I still do: one gave me the two minute rule for filing, one gave me a way to run a meeting that I have used weekly since, and one changed how I cook rather than how I work. That is a hit rate of about seven percent, which I think is normal and worth knowing before you buy the next stack.
One book, one change, ninety days before you buy another. Most of the stack is the problem.
What I did wrong for years was highlight everything and retain nothing. Now I finish a non-fiction book and force myself to write one page from memory the next morning: what it claimed, what I will do, what I do not believe. If I cannot fill the page, the book did not land and I stop pretending it did. That single page has been worth more than the last dozen books.
@indent_error_ivy · last wk. · 2 replies
Mild disagreement with the premise rather than the answer. Books almost never change behaviour on their own, and the ones people credit are usually the ones they happened to read at a moment when something else was already forcing the change. What predicts stickiness in my experience is whether the book contains a procedure you can start on a Tuesday, which is why manuals outperform manifestos. On that basis the ones that worked for me were Deep Work for the scheduling half and Getting Things Done for the capture habit, both of which I use in a mangled form and neither of which I would recommend reading cover to cover.
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@mulch_mule · last wk.
The manual versus manifesto distinction is the most useful thing in this thread and I am stealing it. It also explains why the books I loved most changed the least.
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