Book Review: Switch by Heath Brothers

Another book that I pick because of the recommendation.

I have already knew many of the ideas and experiments but still I got huge amount of useful stories and ideas about habits and change.

I think most important thing this book reminded me about is the idea of mindset. There are two kinds of mindsets: growth mindset and fixed mindset. Only one is the good one unfortunately. Fixed mindset can be seen is sentences like "You are so smart", "You have talent for this". Growth mindset is all about accepting that we are horrible and we do not have talent. You are going to be horrible at everything you start doing but with practice and time every one of us can do much better. This single change in how we think makes big difference. When you start learning something new and you make errors and you think of yourself as a fool you should accept this as natural part of learning! No one is born with all the knowledge. We all need to learn it and it is expected to fail at first. To use this mindset try sentences like "You work so hard", "You studied this for a long time".

Second great idea is about giving yourself and your friends second chance. Sometimes you need to try to stop smoking 16 times and fail to succeed on 17th try.  Remember about it when you or your friends are trying something hard and fail, even for a long time.

It was second book that mentioned idea of pre-loading decision. The idea is that you write exactly when and what you are going to do. This is extremely effective for hard tasks that you are not really doing but you should.

And crux of the book is idea of Rider, Elephant and Path. Making any change you need to think about Rider (analytic part), Elephant (emotions, motivation) and Path (environment). Most of us by default are only trying to persuade the Rider showing numbers and benefits but Rider is weak. If you want to succeed you can't of course ignore the rider, but you need to think about all three.

We are all prone to blame people when Path/environment/situation is really at fault. I will try to think about it.

Book has lots of stories to make it fun to read. There should be more books like this one.

Rating: 9/10