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Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books
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Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books
kasdeya Link ParentWhat's going on with Rings of Power? Last I heard, my LoTR-loving friend was excited to give it a watch - maybe I should warn her about it.What's going on with Rings of Power? Last I heard, my LoTR-loving friend was excited to give it a watch - maybe I should warn her about it.
This is technically a self-help book - though that phrase has very bad connotations to me and I hate to use it to describe something so insightful and, in my case, genuinely life-changing.
Atomic Habits by James Clear. Lately I've been working on improving myself in broad ways - cultivating skills and habits that will hopefully act as force multipliers for everything that I want to accomplish in life. Atomic Habits has been a big part of that.
A few months ago, this video summary of the book opened my eyes to the fact that was I thinking about motivation and habit-forming completely wrong, and that had led me into a rut of false helplessness. In reality, improving at life isn't about cultivating and maintaining "motivation" or "discipline" - those can be useful second-line tactics, but they're exhausting and unsustainable in the long run. The key insight that I got from this video is that there are ways to engineer my life so that I'll automatically and effortlessly choose to do the things that matter to me - no discipline required.
After using the tactics in the video to regain more and more of the energy that my chronic illness stole from me, I finally have enough control of my life to start reading the book itself - which has been almost as life-changing as the initial insights from the video. I highly recommend it to anyone who struggles with controlling themselves, or doing the things that they know they need to do.