As an experiment, here's a thread for people to post about things they care about. Specifically, for things that are possible to contribute to, in some way, and preferably, to invite others to join.
Mine is buying and donating highschool textbooks to schools in the 'grey zone' of Ukraine (where the war kinda isn't fought, but few people would be surprised if it started.) I don't deliver them myself, though.
What's yours?
I finished the book. It's not that long. I'll try to summarize the thesis.
Your capacity to work is based on three forces: motivation, willpower, and habit. Motivation is too unreliable: sometimes you have it, sometimes you don't. Habits are those behaviors that are easier to do than to not do; habits are the most reliable. But they have a chicken and egg problem. You can't use a habit you don't have. Willpower is the most useful, but you have a very limited supply of it; when willpower is overtaxed you can't use it until it recharges enough.
The mistake of most of the self help genre is to focus on motivation. Forget about motivation. You can't control it reliably. You should instead focus on willpower, but considering its limited supply, you must spend it efficiently by bootstrapping just a few habits at a time. Make a daily goal of "stupid simple" positive behaviors you can accomplish with little appreciable effort, that you can FORCE yourself to do even at the last minute, with a headache, while sleep deprived. The deadline is when you fall asleep. Something like reading just two pages of a book, or writing fifty words, or a single push up. If those sound too hard, think of something even easier. Maybe you just open the book. Maybe you just write a single word.
Your abstract goals may be lofty, but your concrete goals must be humble. When you've established a framework of habit, you are free to surf the waves of motivation to do "bonus reps". Read more pages, write more words, do more push ups. But only when you feel like it. It's very important psychologically to count the stupid simple behavior alone as a success. Because you've maintained the habit. Often the hardest part of work is starting. Your mini habit will set you in motion. At that point it's often easier to keep moving. Over time you'll entrench the habit, build willpower by exercising it, and accumulate some real accomplishment.
Once it's a real habit (i.e. easier to do than to not do), then it's no longer costing willpower and you try to add another one.
There are other details in the book. (And parts of it are probably worthless.) What the mindset looks like. How to avoid certain common failure modes. A particularly important one is about breaking your streak. If you accidentally miss a day, it can be very discouraging. Building a habit is like riding a bike up a hill. It's harder to do than to not do, until you reach the top. Don't think of a missed day as a broken link in the chain. Think of it as sliding down the hill, but not all the way down the hill. You've lost progress, but not all progress. This is not an excuse to skip days. It's an excuse to continue even if you miss one by accident. It's better to keep going.
Does the book seem worth reading? If you can't muster the willpower to check it out, just try the technique on one mini habit for a week. Let me know how it goes.
Great summary, and also great advice!
I would recommend reading Don't Shoot the Dog (a book about conditioning in general), which provides some background for this advice. (But maybe it already is in the book, and you just didn't mention it in the summary.) For example...
..this is "obvious in hindsight" when you think about conditioning. If you want the habit to establish firmly, you need to reward it, emotionally, even if it is merely a small part of a ... (read more)