An earnest guide to forming new thought behaviors built on familiar concepts.
Getty challenges readers to eliminate their unhelpful thoughts in this motivational guide.
Everyone overthinks things sometimes, but shutting down repetitive thoughts is easier said than done. When left to run amok, these unwanted cognitions can have a serious negative impact on one’s quality of life. While mindfulness techniques might quiet the chatter temporarily, they may not, on their own, eliminate the root of the problem. “What’s commonly labeled as ‘overthinking’ is actually unproductive thinking,” explains Getty, an entrepreneur and researcher, in her introduction. “And the goal isn’t to stop our thoughts, it’s to make them more productive.” According to the author, productive thoughts are those that align with a person’s values and goals. With this book, Getty aims to help readers to recognize unproductive thoughts, including root causes like an inflexible mindset, self-defeating habits, and low self-confidence. As a remedy, the author offers her 7 Rules of Productive Thinking, a list of affirmation-like perspectives that readers are encouraged to adopt to “unlearn” unproductive thought processes and replace them with productive ones. Rule Four, “I Can Reject What Others Think,” for example, helps readers to place the opinions of others in their rightful context, evaluating them on their merits rather than blindly accepting them as truths. Each rule comes with a list of exercises to ease readers into the habit. The book concludes with several worksheets for readers to practice the ICE method (Identify, Challenge, Evaluate) in various scenarios. Getty is a clear and succinct writer, communicating ideas with minimal jargon. She admits to having no medical license, which she does not view as a limitation. (Her author’s note recounts the time she was criticized in a weekly Zoom meeting for entrepreneurs about her lack of qualifications, which she conveniently dismisses as an example of negative thinking.) Though the book does have some useful methods, they mostly seem recycled from cognitive behavioral therapy. In such a crowded field, this slim volume fails to persuade readers that it has anything new to offer.
An earnest guide to forming new thought behaviors built on familiar concepts.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798990026612
Page Count: 149
Publisher: The Thought Method Co
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
