Overblown but well-written and entertaining.
Why “things work, until they don’t” and what to do about it.
In this brisk book, two “entrepreneurial analysts” examine those times when you plateau (get stuck) in life and stop growing. “Plateaus are a sign—a tangible warning—that your life, your relationships, or your business is clogged,” write NBC News journalist Sullivan (Stop Getting Ripped Off: Why Consumers Get Screwed, and How You Can Always Get a Fair Deal, 2009, etc.) and mathematician and IT security expert Thompson, who draw on research and their own experiences to discuss how people reach a point of numbing sameness in their lives and work, no matter how much they keep trying harder. Plateaus are laws of nature and occur regularly, write the authors, but they can be overcome. Examining behavior in diverse settings—e.g., students trying to memorize material for a test, professional baseball player Derek Jeter in training sessions, diners who quickly fail to notice the dominant odor in a stinky garlic restaurant—they show how plateaus can frustrate dieters, stymie businesses and lead to exasperation, even desperation. Many readers will be fascinated by their descriptions of such underlying matters as acclimation, flow and distortion mechanisms. The importance of timing, for example, is illustrated by the work of cognitive psychologist Piotr Wozniak, who has shown that learning occurs in between the times you are trying to learn. For all their recounting of the science behind the ruts we fall into in life, the authors wind up offering utterly common-sense solutions: If things are stuck, shake it up, they write. Try new things. Take a break now and then. Breathe. Avoid distractions. Avoid perfectionism.
Overblown but well-written and entertaining.Pub Date: May 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-525-95280-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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
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