In a wide-ranging package, Alter offers practical advice on how to break free of inertia and blaze a new path.
A useful look at how to get “unstuck.”
At some point in their lives, everyone will experience the sense that they are stuck in a rut, unable to move forward, even though a part of them says they should. Alter, a professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and author of Drunk Tank Pink and Irresistible, is interested in this “stuckness,” and his latest book collects a large number of case studies, with a focus on how various well-known figures have overcome the mental patterns and negative emotions that create inertia. For people who want to move forward but do not know how, a thorough audit of goals is a good start. Be willing to experiment and accept that finding the right path might involve repeated failures. In other cases, people might have an aspiration but be unsure about next steps. Breaking the task into manageable pieces and deciding what should constitute success can make it less daunting. Careful research about the goal will take away the anxiety connected with the unknown. Alter believes that habit is one of the key impediments to making changes. The antidote to this is conscious action, even if means starting with small and apparently unconnected elements. The aim is to change a habit of inertia into a model of activity. Another way to do this is to deliberately associate with people unlike yourself, which will provoke new ideas. The author delivers consistently intriguing ideas, but he loses the thread of his argument, and a few of the cases he cites are not relevant to his point. Nevertheless, the book could serve as a valuable launching pad for anyone looking to take a new step in their life.
In a wide-ranging package, Alter offers practical advice on how to break free of inertia and blaze a new path.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781982182960
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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