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This is a self help book. Do not groan! The book provides some simple techniques to practice in a useful framework that will allow the readers to create a process that works for themselves. I read this book at a time when I was finding it difficult to create new habits and stick with them for a considerable period of time.
Think of this - what is a habit? A habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. When you are starting off to form a habit, you just have an idea (a good idea for a habit hopefully) that you want to do over and over again so that it improves you as a person in the long run, but you don't quite know how often you need to do it before it turns into a habit or what it means to perform the habit subconciously so that it feels second nature. This is where the book helps create and (hopefully) follow a personal 4 step process:
Step 1: First think about what habit you want to create and why i.e. what problem is this habit trying to solve. Lets say the habit we want to create is "Wake up at 6am every day, so that......". The rational for this habit could be to get to work early or go to the gym every morning or prepare your kids to school every day or whatever else that you may want to achieve. This step is called "Defining the Unknown"
Step 2: Next step is to realize that you want to concoct a concious procedure and follow it so that you are able to establish this habit eventually in the long run. This step is called "Defining a Process to solve the Unknown"
Step 3: Now that you have a process defined, you need a method to follow the process frequently but conciously for a period of time. This step is called "Conciously solve the Unknown"
Step 4: Now as you perform Step 3 conciously, you are conciously solving the unknown for a period of time over and over again, that this process is embedded into your routine and you will start to subconciously want to follow the process. This step is called "Unconciously solve the Unknown". When you reach this step, you have formed a habit. And everytime you don't follow the process (subconciously), you feel guilty of not having done something. The guilt will urge you to repeat Step 3 and Step 4 until you don't feel guilty again.
The simple process above generally tends to get stuck for most people in Step 2 or Step 3 while you are trying to embed a new habit into your lifestyle. The main thesis of this 'getting stuck problem' is that our minds are made up of two separate parts - the human and the chimp.
The human is rational and intelligent, the chimp is emotional and instinctive. The human always wants to improve and do the right thing. But, our problems come when the chimp dominates the human and often overrides the human, because the chimp is much more powerful than we are. The chimp would say - "Lets sleep for 15mins past 6am and snooze the alarm" although the human wants to get up at 6am to form a habit. The most effective way to successfully form a habit is by somehow managing the chimp. You can only manage the chimp, you can never get rid of it. This means, you are occassionaly going to slip and feel guilty but that's ok as long as you are able to loop back into the Step 3 and Step 4 swiftly.
This book guides you through how to alienate the chimp and control it so that you are able to achieve all that you want to.
I found the chimp/human concept of the book quite intriguing. This concept stays part of the narration through the book. However, a part of the book didn't work so well for me (hence the 4 stars). This is when the author used complicated concepts like "moons of something or other" and "planets of this and that". There may have been some useful information in this part of the book but I struggled to keep track of it and instead of educating me, it confused me. May be it was just me.
Overall, good book. I recommend reading this and taking notes. The tone is funny and the content is fairly simple (until it got to the planets and moons for me). And surely gives the reader a useful framework to practice the art of controlling the chimp that resides in every hu(wo)man.
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