Book Reviews: Habits, Products and Businesses
Over the past three weeks, I had the opportunity to devour three iconic pieces of work around habits and habit forming products. Here is the review and some learnings:
1.Atomic Habits by James Clear: The book outlines simple, step by step processes to break bad habits and replace them with useful ones. It just does not leave the discussion at the practicality level. The book delves deeper into brain science for providing an explanation for habit patterns. However, the most profound lessons for me came from the latter half of the book. The writer explains how the willingness to do ‘boring’ things differentiates the winners. “The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.”
What I have experienced is that routines are extremely helpful for both physical and mental health. When the day is set out for important and useful work, there is very little room for harmful actions or thoughts. Habits reduce decision fatigue. Routines free up brain capacity for important tasks.
This is the kind of book I would recommend for anyone and everyone. Even if you are not struggling with routines and habits, the book offers a lot of insight into how our brains work.
2. Hooked by Nir Eyal: The book breaks down the components of habit forming products. Both the writers- James Clear and Nir Eyal acknowledge each other’s work around researching habits. Just like Atomic Habits, this book takes cues from brain research to understand habit forming products. Very briefly, the book also looks into the ethics of building such products.
The four aspects of trigger, action, variable reward and investment are fairly understood by product creators. The major make or break point revolves around solving for the right problem. The book gives some clues on identifying the right problems but the focus is more on building the product.
This book is recommended for anyone who is interested in understanding the success of ‘viral’ products or interested in building such products.
3. Zero to One by Peter Thiel: This can appear to be eye opening or delusional, depending on where you stand. I found the ideas to be brilliant. The contrarian belief that competition is the opposite of capitalism is where the book starts. It is replete with themes of good old fashioned hard work and single minded resolve. The book is full of ‘not so well known’ viewpoints and ends with propounding that the most successful businesses will be the ones that empower people rather than making them obsolete.
The parts that stood out to me the most were around how competition has become the mainstay of our education and business systems. The writer explains how this is more harmful than useful and can lead to unexplored potentials. Competition forces us to follow the norms and restricts our thinking to the race being run. It cages us in and shuns out-of-the-box thinking. It diminishes the kind of thinking required for building something new. Peter Thiel’s 2*2 matrix around infinite/finite optimism/pessimism is extremely insightful. Overall, the book takes a very different approach towards business than what is usually taught in business school.
The book is an interesting read. Anyone who enjoys looking at widely held beliefs with a new lens, should give this one a try.
‘Atomic Habits’ and ‘Hooked’ are quite similar in the ideas they propound. ‘Zero to One’ is majorly focused on business and entrepreneurship. However, all three of these books are bound by the common thread of evoking their readers towards positive actions. Actions that can have a lasting effect on the individual and on the world.
