There is a role for summaries with different levels of detail. The short capsule summaries are useful(for one thing, it is easier to remember) and your link itself is a great example.
But, there is also a role for longer summaries, which are still short relative to the book, but include useful points and some of the illustrative examples not present in the shorter summaries. Reading a 250 page book has ample scope for the mind to wander and lose track of the important issues which is not an issue with a 10 page summary.
Further, summaries at this level are less available, and it would be a good thing if more books had such summaries. (The downside being people might be more likely to skip the original book and the author is not rewarded - this can be corrected to an extent if the author themselves give these shorter summaries at the end of the book or as a separate short book. Also, some others might be motivated to get the original book after reading the summary).
7500 might barely be considered a novelette. But if you're going to categorize non-fiction in fiction terms, the most comfortable length category is short story, which usually goes up to 10k.
I loved reading Atomic Habits during the first lockdown. I was excited to try out its actionables, specially tracking to keep me honest.
I tried a bunch of iOS apps, but wanted no friction, no tracking, no cloud, no social, etc. so eventually built https://flathabits.com. Also wanted to own my habit data (as plain text), so I made sure Flat Habits stored its data locally as an org file.
I'm an Emacs nutter and can say the strength of a habit tracker lies in removing daily friction from the tracking process itself. The plain text part is cherry on top (bringing piece of mind around lock-in). In my case, it's been months since I looked at the plain text file itself.
As for forming habits themselves (the actual goal)... it's been well over a year since I started running. I've kept it up since reading Atomic Habits (and started tracking).
Whoa, this is the app I've been looking for. Thank you so much. Every app under the sun now requires an account, has a friends list and stores data remotely.
I read this book and I think this sums it up in a Tweet:
The laws are: Make it obvious, Make it attractive, Make it easy, Make it satisfying; Each law maps to one of the four steps of habit formation: Make it obvious → Cue Make it attractive → Craving Make it easy → Response Make it satisfying → Reward; Make it Obvious To effectively build a new habit, make the cue for that habit blatantly obvious
In the book he takes almost this example. Once a week (after doing grocery shopping for example) prepare some fruits: peel and cut them if applicable and place them in containers in your fridge. Then, when times comes to have a snack it's really easy to eat fruit vs. something else. That would be the "make it easy" rule. You could combine it with the inverse of that same rule rule for junk food: "make it hard" and don't buy junk food during grocery shopping.
Yup. In general - handle the dependencies after you've done The Thing instead of before doing it the next time.
It's easy to do Y and Z after you already got up and did X. It's much harder to persuade yourself to do Y so that you can do Z so that you can do X when you're lying in bed fighting to get out 15 minutes earlier.
I've been having major issues reading books (mainly non-fiction and strategy and personal development oriented) due to what I feel to be "filler content" as mentioned in the thread above.
I'd be very interested in authors (I mean book authors) to provide direction on the mindset and shortcomings of the summary culture (e.g. Blinkist et-al)
Surely, every 10th article on my FB feed is about reading books and there is perhaps enough justification to read books
I recommend reading the author's blogs & listening to their podcasts. The goal is to have their core ideas drilled into your head, and sometimes that takes time. Having a cadence of a weekly blog post does that much better I find.
Maybe don't try to read the whole book in one week, but rather space out each chapter over a long period of time so that the message "sticks" with you.
I question the value of services like Blinkist. If you reduce a book to a five minute gist, what does the reader gain? Maybe a "huh, neat" at best. What is remembered? Are there any lasting takeaways? Padding popsci nonfiction with anecdotes is as old as the genre itself. Comprehension requires time and variety, and all those stories and asides can help reinforce and round out the message.
If you're just looking for the point or thesis of one of these books to satisfy your curiosity, you obviously don't need to bother with however many hundreds of pages there might be, especially if you view reading as a chore.
I tried Blinkist but gave up quickly. Their summaries are not high quality. I don't know who writes them. When I looked up summaries of books I'd already read (Deep Work, Startup of You and some others) they didn't match my sense of the book.
I wish someone would fill this niche. There's definitely a need for a good book summarization service. The service shouldn't try to replace the book-read. They only need to help you decide whether you should buy/borrow the book.
I read close to 70 books last year and learned to skim all the filler by scanning down the page, reading a paragraphs first sentence until I get past the filler. Or I skip complete sections/chapters based on their titles. Business books all follow a formula with clear chapter descriptions and authors guide to content in the intro. I haven’t found summaries valuable because it’s not always the authors main point that sparks ideas for me.
In my view its an antiquated business model and there is no virtue in clinging to it as a writer or buying into it as a reader. Ideas are not better merely because they've been printed and bound. Most ideas in this genre can be (and are) expressed in a blog post, but the legion of middlemen in the publishing industry can't make money on blog posts. One of the ways publishers stick their fingers into this process is by demanding more material.
I have the same feelings as you a lot of these books are glorified blog posts - my trick to dealing with them is to treat them as such. I read on kindle so for books like this I read on my ipad and check the 'continuous scrolling' option. Eliminating the 'book' aspect of them makes you feel less guilty for skipping whole paragraphs when they're really just filler!
I always go way too late to bed, reading hacker news all night, and wake up late and exhausted as a consequence.
First impressions of this blog post are good, going to think of ways to change my identity and behavior, and report back in a month or so with the outcomes here.
One thing I have found that helps is "not finding my phone attractive". Weird phrasing, pardon my English.
Basically, I have a midrange phone that cannot play the latest games at 60fps, and has a crack on its tempered glass running through the middle. This functionality and appearance makes it much less appealing than say, a Kindle with no scratches to spend time on.
Due to this, I basically forget my phone is next to me on my bed, and it only serves to take calls if needed in the middle of the night and wake me up next morning with the alarm.
The thing that I've found helpful with going to sleep on time and not spending too much time in the night on the phone is to just keep the phone in a different room. That way, you either read a book or go to sleep, both of which are better than social media (including HN IMO)
I also keep my phone in another room. Helps me with waking up because I need to get up to turn the alarm off. For going to bed on time, with which I still struggle, I tried to set reminders on the phone.
- 10 PM - Stop chores.
- 11 PM, settle down. Means no "active" things anymore, like gaming, HN. I lie down. Reading a book would be best then, watching TV is a bit worse but still more passive. Audiobooks or podcasts get me sleeping then right away.
- 11 PM: Go to bed. Getting up from the couch, brush teeth, go to bed. I think a routine like this is very helpful.
Seconded on updates! Staying up too late is the issue I have struggled with for the longest time and all my attempts to change the behaviour have failed in the long run (e.g. working out earlier in the day, short periods of taking melatonin at a particular time to 'reset my circadian rhythm', meditation before bed, cutting out caffeine).
I have an older iPhone, and a triple tap of the home button will toggle grayscale. Incredible difference in my sensory experience when everything looks a bit…dull.
Pleased to see this pop up here today as I'd just finished the book yesterday.
I've been putting off buying it for a long time as I'd assumed it was another great blog turned into a book that contained 90% filler.
As someone else said below, there's a small amount of filler in here, but it feels like the right amount and allows you to take the time to absorb the content more fully.
I honestly feel like this book has fundamentally changed the way I view work, side projwects and tasks in general. I've procrastinated on a number of things as they felt like huge efforts that were not achievable - reading Mr Clear makes me realise that I can achieve those by not focusing on the end goal but getting into a habit, a system, and chipping away at it over time.
You could say the book's content is obvious stuff, but it's certainly opened my eyes and changed my thinking.
In fact, the Rich Roll podcast episode with James Clear is the one I'd recommend for all. Roll is a great listener and interviewer, and together they did a much better job than the book alone in focusing on the forging-an-identity part of habit formation. Highly recommended, it's something like two hours long.
Readit News
The summary at the end of the book is shorter than this blog post and contains the big takeaways.
I love this book as much as the other person does, but there are much better reads to go deeper into some of the inspiration:
https://twitter.com/JamesClear/status/1059504529111158784
Additionally the major influences on the book:
https://twitter.com/jamesclear/status/1059521349239169024
Tiny Habits for example is super underrated and one of the better habit books if you enjoyed this one.
The original title "The Thinner Book: Atomic Habits by James Clear" is explicit on its nature:
> The most important ideas in your typical 300-page book can usually be distilled into several pages. These several pages are the thinner book.
But, there is also a role for longer summaries, which are still short relative to the book, but include useful points and some of the illustrative examples not present in the shorter summaries. Reading a 250 page book has ample scope for the mind to wander and lose track of the important issues which is not an issue with a 10 page summary.
Further, summaries at this level are less available, and it would be a good thing if more books had such summaries. (The downside being people might be more likely to skip the original book and the author is not rewarded - this can be corrected to an extent if the author themselves give these shorter summaries at the end of the book or as a separate short book. Also, some others might be motivated to get the original book after reading the summary).
https://smmry.com/https://www.chrisbehan.ca/posts/atomic-hab...
I tried a bunch of iOS apps, but wanted no friction, no tracking, no cloud, no social, etc. so eventually built https://flathabits.com. Also wanted to own my habit data (as plain text), so I made sure Flat Habits stored its data locally as an org file.
I'm an Emacs nutter and can say the strength of a habit tracker lies in removing daily friction from the tracking process itself. The plain text part is cherry on top (bringing piece of mind around lock-in). In my case, it's been months since I looked at the plain text file itself.
As for forming habits themselves (the actual goal)... it's been well over a year since I started running. I've kept it up since reading Atomic Habits (and started tracking).
Please let me pay you for this app.
If you wanna send me money, you can buy my other app ;) https://plainorg.com
How do you do this bit? Is it documented anywhere? (or maybe I'm missing the obvious)
Ad-free and FOSS: https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits
The laws are: Make it obvious, Make it attractive, Make it easy, Make it satisfying; Each law maps to one of the four steps of habit formation: Make it obvious → Cue Make it attractive → Craving Make it easy → Response Make it satisfying → Reward; Make it Obvious To effectively build a new habit, make the cue for that habit blatantly obvious
It's easy to do Y and Z after you already got up and did X. It's much harder to persuade yourself to do Y so that you can do Z so that you can do X when you're lying in bed fighting to get out 15 minutes earlier.
Make it easier to do the good habits, and harder to the bad ones.
I'd recommend looking into the research that Prof. Wendy Wood at USC Marshall has been doing on habit forming behaviour in humans.
I'd be very interested in authors (I mean book authors) to provide direction on the mindset and shortcomings of the summary culture (e.g. Blinkist et-al)
Surely, every 10th article on my FB feed is about reading books and there is perhaps enough justification to read books
Maybe don't try to read the whole book in one week, but rather space out each chapter over a long period of time so that the message "sticks" with you.
If you're just looking for the point or thesis of one of these books to satisfy your curiosity, you obviously don't need to bother with however many hundreds of pages there might be, especially if you view reading as a chore.
I wish someone would fill this niche. There's definitely a need for a good book summarization service. The service shouldn't try to replace the book-read. They only need to help you decide whether you should buy/borrow the book.
The core message is quite insightful and worth knowing, but the author doesn’t respect the readers time.
Edit: some book notes from Derek Sivers-
https://sive.rs/book/EMythRevisited
It’s like a modern open world video game in book form.
My goal is to explore new ideas, expand my second brain, and share the learnings with my audience.
Dead Comment
First impressions of this blog post are good, going to think of ways to change my identity and behavior, and report back in a month or so with the outcomes here.
Hacker news is not really any different, it is just easier to justify as “I might find something useful here”.
But all I achieved here is fav & forget smart sounding articles, and point whored at the comment section for easy dopamine.
It’s a trap.
Basically, I have a midrange phone that cannot play the latest games at 60fps, and has a crack on its tempered glass running through the middle. This functionality and appearance makes it much less appealing than say, a Kindle with no scratches to spend time on.
Due to this, I basically forget my phone is next to me on my bed, and it only serves to take calls if needed in the middle of the night and wake me up next morning with the alarm.
Good luck!
- 10 PM - Stop chores.
- 11 PM, settle down. Means no "active" things anymore, like gaming, HN. I lie down. Reading a book would be best then, watching TV is a bit worse but still more passive. Audiobooks or podcasts get me sleeping then right away.
- 11 PM: Go to bed. Getting up from the couch, brush teeth, go to bed. I think a routine like this is very helpful.
I have an older iPhone, and a triple tap of the home button will toggle grayscale. Incredible difference in my sensory experience when everything looks a bit…dull.
I've been putting off buying it for a long time as I'd assumed it was another great blog turned into a book that contained 90% filler.
As someone else said below, there's a small amount of filler in here, but it feels like the right amount and allows you to take the time to absorb the content more fully.
I honestly feel like this book has fundamentally changed the way I view work, side projwects and tasks in general. I've procrastinated on a number of things as they felt like huge efforts that were not achievable - reading Mr Clear makes me realise that I can achieve those by not focusing on the end goal but getting into a habit, a system, and chipping away at it over time.
You could say the book's content is obvious stuff, but it's certainly opened my eyes and changed my thinking.
Highly recommend.
There just wasn't much there to grab a hold of me. Nothing new I had not heard in multiple poscasts or read in articles elsewhere.
Not saying the book is bad, just not so phenomenal when the ideas aren't new to you.
Does anybody ever really read them cover to cover? Does anybody retain all these words?
For me the volume of filler in most books is overwhelming.