A cue, a routine, and a reward

This is not a very exciting book for my first review but it was interesting.  I found some parts more interesting than others and I don’t know if I will change any of my habits in the coming year but I am glad I listened to this book.  (Hopefully I will start the habit of writing and posting my reviews timely)

This book is broken down in sections about personal, business, consumer, and societal habits.   I found the personal and social sections the most engaging and I probably will be able to bring some ideas out of the business section to my job but the consumer section did not grab me at all.  In the beginning of the book there was a case study on a man that had the part of his brain that create memories.  If you asked him to draw a map of his house he could not remember the layout and could not perform the task but he could make his way to the kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom.  His wife would take walks with him around their neighborhood but he could not draw a map of the block where he lived.  Once he left the house without her and was able to navigate the neighborhood and return home without any knowledge of what he was doing.  The route of their walks created patterns in his brain that allowed him to complete tasks with any memory of doing them.  Reading that in the beginning of the book did give me a different perspective on habit and allowed me to listen to the other sections with a different perspective of how much control we have over our habits.

The reviews I read on this book say there are several books on the topic that are better than this one but this was the one available at my library.  With that said I enjoyed the book and am glad I took the time to listen.   If you are familiar with this topic this book may not be in depth enough for you but I have not done much reading on this topic and found it a good introduction and will probably seek out other books on this topic.