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I didn’t really want to pick up the book, “The Power of Habit- Why we do what we do in life and business”, by Charles Duhigg, but it was recommended by a colleague at work, and recommended by Google’s reps, so I figured “I’m short on book options so I’ll pick it up”.

It doesn’t SOUND like a good book… the cover doesn’t LOOK like a good book. It sounds pretty lame, but on the contrary, you should pick it up!

The book dives into habits, and discusses what habits really are, and how much of our lives are truly dictated by habits. Most of what we do on a day to day basis really is habit. Then it gets into both how they impact us, and how they impact our organizations.

Whether your looking at it from a personal perspective or you are looking at it from the standpoint of your organization, it applies. Every one of us is influenced by habits. Many of us are influencing OTHER people’s habits too, and therefore it is challenging to find someone who this doesn’t apply to.

One chapter in particular, Chapter 7 in the book and chapter 8 in the Audiobook, really stood out to me. This is because it is an area that I focus most of my day-to-day professional energy. Using data to frankly predict and understand what people are doing better than they do. To some people this chapter may be “enlightening”, as they don’t realize how the data is used around them and how companies are using it. To me personally, its not a surprise at all, as I’m one of the people doing this, and I’m well past the “surprise” stage, and frankly am doing cutting edge things that are beyond the scope of this book.

But this helped jump into some case studies that other companies are engaging in, and it talks about what they discovered about implementing this type of analytics, which is something many of us in this industry deal with on a regular basis.

The book is broken into four sections:
Part 1: Individuals
Part 2: Organizations
Part 3: Society
Appendix: What to do about it.

The chapters jump around quite a bit, so reading them out of order won’t cause you too much headache once you get past Part 1, which lays the groundwork for the rest. In addition, you can skip the appendix if your not trying to change your own habits.

Some people will find part 1 and part 3 most interesting, more of the corporate folks will find 1 and 2 more interesting, but get through part 1 and feel your way around a bit…. or just dive in and take it all in. You will be better off understanding how habits work, and how much they control our day to day lives.

Procter & Gamble’s Febreeze was going to be a failure, until they found out how to fit it into habits.
Target was able to predict whose going to have a baby when, even when mothers didn’t tell them, creeping them out until they changed their approach.

Hard to say this type of content isn’t relevant, and I’m skipping over the “obvious” take away from the book, which is how to identify a habit, identify the triggers and rewards, and then create a new habit to replace it. I’m guessing most people got that plot line by simply reading the title, but it is indeed in there. When I read other reviews on the book, this is actually the part they “focus” on, but to me this part isn’t the most important part- the application of this information is, and its the application of this knowledge to your life and organizations that can make a big difference to yourself and others… in fact it even changed the way I am approaching marketing MillionaireWho (which I wasn’t even going to market at all, until I really thought about how I need to get inside people’s day to day habits if I want to help improve their lives!)

I’d talk about it more, but I think in this case you should pick it up.

One of the easiest ways for me to judge if I like a book or not is to determine what I do when I get home. I primarily “read” audiobooks, and listen during my 1 hour daily commute. Books I don’t like, I’ll “forget” to restart it the next time I get in the car at worst, or just shut it off and keep listening to it next time I get in the car at best.

The really good books however, I’ll sit in the garage for a while when I get home, or I’ll sit in the parking lot for a little bit after I get to work, because I don’t want to shut it off.

The BEST books on the other hand, I plug headphones into, and find an excuse to listen to it at various times throughout the days. these books are incredibly rare.

The Power of Habit definitely falls in the “really good” book category, but not the “best”. I recommend others read it. It actually has new original information you haven’t pulled together in this way before, which is really helpful to your personal life and career. I didn’t want to go into the house when I got home, and I didn’t want to head into the office when I got to work- I wanted to keep listening. What is really impressive about this, is the book is over TEN HOURS long. There are other long audiobooks, but there’s a lot that are just a couple of hours long. This was more than 10 hours, and totally worth it.

You’ll start living with a different perspective on things! So if this intrigues you, go pick up the book… and if it doesn’t… well, your missing out!

The book:

The Audiobook:

As I’ve mentioned many times, Reading and continuing education are very important to me.

I went through a little drought where I wasn’t having much luck finding good books to read/listen to. This is pitiful in the scheme of things, because there are millions of books out there, but I grabbed a few duds and that slowed me down a bit.

I can’t say that the 10x rule ever came up on my top 10 list, but Audible was running a special with a bunch of buy-one-get-one books, and Grant Cardone’s 10x rule made the cut.

I had already read “If your not first your last”, so I was familiar with Grant Cardone. I’m not a salesman, and he is a Sales training guy, so that set me back at first, but I decided to give it a shot. After all, the “only difference between success and failure is the 10x rule!” yeah!

The book set me back initially because I knew it was a typically over-hyped semi-sales pitch to build the brand of Grant Cardone himself. Some books are awfully aggressive, ego-boosting the author the entire time. While Grant uses personal examples in the book, I won’t quite say it was a rolling advertisement. I didn’t feel offended or over-sold to.

This book is one of those books that I don’t think I “Learned” anything from. I don’t want to suggest there wasn’t valuable ideas, but there wasn’t anything “new” or “Novel”. Thats OK though, because the book was very much a pep rally, jazzing you up about doing stuff.

This is, in many circumstances, invaluable. From my experience, the reason 99% of people fail is because they don’t get off their rear end and DO SOMETHING. The 10x rule premise is precisely that- anything worth doing is 10x bigger and takes 10x longer to see success. It reminds you that its essential that you get busy being productive, and that you stop using the excuses of those around you why you shouldn’t. This is, while not novel, a very important lesson that I feel is grossly under-recognized. I give Grant some serious credit for knocking that into your head over and over again to the point that reading the book for 15 minutes makes you want to put the book down so you can go make things happen. I don’t think its possible to read the book and not increase your productivity simply because of its ability to get you excited about it.

I truly respect and appreciate Grant’s argument that being all you can be is actually a duty, and that being lazy is bad for you, your family, and our society. I firmly agree. Just imagine how great it would be if everyone took Grant’s advice!

Grant walks you through taking the “fourth degree” of action, which is MASSIVE action. No one sees tremendous success by doing what everyone else is doing, you have to do massive action- more than anyone else is willing to do. Grant also talks about the idea that time management is a myth, and while I used to look for the elusive “Time management”, I have come to the conclusion that Grant Cardone’s perspective is indeed correct. So stop behaving like everyone else and go be successful already!

In a nutshell, I can’t say that this was a revolutionary book. I don’t know if I’d run out and recommend it, unless you need to get off your rear end and make things happen. For everyone else its positive reinforcement on what you already know. Sure, if you are looking for a book to read its a fine option. I would never turn someone away from it, but its not going to be making my top 25 list anytime soon!

I’ve always been a huge advocate about education and always learning everything you can about the topic. So after Brian Urlage @Source1Auto pitched to me Gary Vaynerchuk’s event in Florida coming up, I decided I should probably finally get around to reading “Crush It”. It made it onto this week’s to do list, and I wrapped it up.

I’m honestly torn on whether or not I want to recommend the book, so I’m giving it the “OK” designation. Gary does self-promote, but not as offensively as many of his counterparts. He offers genuine thoughts and perspectives, but the entire book wraps up to what you probably already know.

It may seem small, but one thing I get stuck on is his reference to eventually succeeding enough to make 50k/year. I have to anticipate he’s trying to tone down crazy expectations some people have of being overnight millionaires. I love his quote that the only place that happens is the lottery. On the same note, it’s a lot of work for just 50 grand a year… so it better be your core passion. As long as you truly live it and breathe it, its free money, right?

I can summarize the book in a few phrases for those who haven’t read it:

1. Work your rear end off. Work every day, all the time, and live your brand/site/product
2. Be patient. You may not be successful in 2 years or 5 years, but stick to it.
3. Having great content is important, which is pretty much the marketing concept of “Product”. Be the expert in whatever you are passionate about
4. Great content needs to be everywhere, which is essentially the marketing concept of “Placement”
5. Having great content isn’t enough, and you need to spent most of your time engaging others, which is essentially “promotion”
6. Be authentic, and true to you. It’s the only way to maintain passion and come off as real to your users.

I firmly doubt the effectiveness of personal branding quite to the effect suggested in the book. Trust me, I think personal branding is important- I’ve hired professional designers to make my custom web page and I am all about building a brand, but the concept that resumes are useless and your followers will offer you a job when you lose yours? Not so much. If you have enough followers to do that, then odds are you have enough followers that you don’t need to work at all!

It is a great book to get jazzed up about. He’s pretty motivational from that regard. I would never suggest people avoid the book, but take it with a grain of salt. Branding is a piece of the puzzle, but its not the whole story, and thinking that a personal brand is all you need in life works for very few people.

On the contrary, it compliments products and services quite well!

Gary Vaynerchuck’s “Crush It” is available on amazon here: