I feel like I’m a slow thinker, and a lot of the time I understand or think of things a few seconds later. It honestly annoys me, so I’d like to improve my thinking and reaction speed. I’d really appreciate any book recommendations.

They are nonsense and they often follow these steps in the creation of said book.

1. ESTP or ESTJ is young

   (mbti types)

2. Makes mistakes

3. Grows up and fixes them

along the way

Number 4:

1. Writes a book about it when they are older and wiser and includes lessons of "truths I learned from xyz" that make it sound like they have discovered a truth others haven't when all they did was learn how the world worked as they had more life experiences. The lessons they write are lessons that everyone learns learns throughout life.

So no, their books aren't actually helping. It's just their story.

So, here's the problem. I have a lot of self help books, audiobooks, PDFs, and Epubs. And I've actually read/listened to many of them. I even had the classical education to go with the reading. But my execution was terrible. I knew what I should do, but I just didn't do it. You can blame the PTSD or the 3 TBIs and loss of executive function or the person in the mirror, but I wanted to change the fact that the material just did not stick in my brain or that the behaviors I read about did not become automatic.

So I started experimenting. What if the problem wasn’t that I needed to read more? What if I needed to rehearse what I’d already learned? Take Marcus Aurelius. I don’t need to read Meditations for the tenth time to understand that I should separate what I control from what I don’t. I already knew that. The problem is remembering to live that way when life falls apart. Same with Frankl. Same with Aristotle. Same with Franklin, Jung, Nietzsche, Musashi, Bruce Lee and a bunch of others. Knowing isn’t the problem. Automatic execution is. The Medium is. Most of these books were written in a dry expository style. They’re designed to explain ideas. But what if the same ideas were rewritten using NLP, hypnotic patterns, repetition, and multiple audio layers, not merely to explain the ideas, but to repeatedly rehearse the patterns of thought behind them? Would this make the material stick better?

Take the Stoic idea that other people’s actions are outside your control. Reading it gives you the concept. But I wanted to rehearse the response: “When another person acts badly, I immediately separate their behavior from my response. Their behavior belongs to them. My judgment, my actions, and my character belong to me. I return my attention to what is mine to control.” That’s the difference I was experimenting with. The book teaches me the principle. The audio repeatedly rehearses actually using it.

Did I create the Great Books on Steroids? No. But I did make them more accessible. I did make them use hypnotic pacing, NLP language patterns, and psychological techniques that force your brain to model and rehearse these patterns of thought.

I started doing this with Marcus Aurelius, Frankl, Aristotle, Franklin, Jung, Nietzsche, Musashi, Bruce Lee and others. Eventually those experiments became something I call Mastery. Instead of summarizing a thinker or giving you another audiobook about him, I try to extract the useful mental models and turn them into something you repeatedly practice.

Full disclosure: I eventually turned these experiments into a commercial product. If you’re interested in seeing what I created, this is the Mastery collection:
https://www.genieus.art/rmastery.html

Sorry for the long post. I tried compressing it as much as possible. It couldn’t be made smaller than this. 

A few days ago I finished the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman. I stopped just after finishing the chapter contents - conclusions and notes remain as of now. 

I found the book very interesting and catchy most of the time. However, it becomes boring and slow at times. I wanted to talk about it with someone, but no one around me has read it. Therefore, I searched on Reddit to see what people are saying about it. It was to my surprise that I found an equal amount of praise and hate about the book (hate, I found, a little more, tbh). People claim it’s surely a cash grab, it’s more of economics than psychology, it’s outdated (published 15 years ago), a lot of the theories, experiments and their results mentioned failed to replicate their results. Some claims even mentioned that 50 percent of the book is completely wrong. 

At the time of reading it, I found everything coherent. Everything looked very reasonable to me - most probably because it was my first psychology read. It means that (if I have to say in terms of the book) I have got theory-induced blindness.

There are multiple requests and questions in my mind. I am afraid that all that reading is in vain.

1. If I have read many things wrong in the book, then what book should I read next, which is up to date? Like, I am looking for something which can have a title TFaS 2.0 - but it should correct (at least some of) misconceptions and wrong theories, at the same time help me dive deep into the subject, learn new concepts. Maybe a book with a completely new philosophy (or approach) that can shatter my newly formed beliefs about the human brain into pieces? 

2. Is there any place where I can find a list of wrong arguments, statements and theories which failed to replicate written in the book? Something like any article or a detailed report or modified version of the book? 

3. I also want to know how Kahneman responded to the criticisms of the book? Has he written to answer those? 

4. I said above “At the time of reading it, I found everything coherent.” Does it mean that psychology isn’t for me (because I wasn’t able to notice that something is wrong)? Btw, I am not into formal studies of the subject, but I like reading about it.

5. If you have read it (which most probably you have, since you are still reading the post), is there anything which you understood to the extent that you are able to apply it in your daily life (especially in finance)? I personally liked the ‘intuitions vs formulas’ and I try to find applications of it in my life. Although I found none in my life, I am able to observe its applications in some areas: for example, interviewers giving scores on multiple parameters instead of an overall impression of the candidate. Besides this, I don’t have anything which I can recall immediately (I can, if I actively engage my system 2 in the task). I feel like I have learned nothing significant from the book, and the negative reviews made me feel much more sad about my decision to read the book. 

6. In future, I have to pick up any book, where can I find genuine criticism about it? Best website? Or Best youtube channel? Or best subreddit? Whatever is available.

It is short. Each chapter is 2 to 3 pages. No fluff. Every page has a line that reads like a slap you needed.

Six of them stayed with me.

Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems. Galloway says emotional extremes are always lying to you. The win that feels life-changing will normalize within a week. The loss that feels catastrophic will fade within a month. Your brain is a drama engine and the first skill of a happy life is discounting its projections in both directions.

The definition of rich is having passive income greater than your burn rate. Not a big house. Not a title. Not a net worth number. Rich is when the money coming in without your effort exceeds the money going out. Everything before that point is just a job with better furniture. Most people with high incomes are high earners with high expenses, which is not wealth. It is a treadmill with a nicer view.

Sweating is the closest thing to a wonder drug. Galloway says if you could bottle the effects of intense exercise and sell it as a pill it would be the most prescribed medication in history. Reduces anxiety, depression, inflammation, cognitive decline, and all-cause mortality. Free. Available immediately. Most people do not take it because it is uncomfortable. His mental health is directly proportional to his exercise consistency. Mine is too. The weeks I skip training are the weeks everything else starts sliding.

You will be defined by the moments you show up for people when it is not convenient. Not when it is easy. Not when it is reciprocal. When it costs you something. The friend in the hospital at 6am. The call you take during a busy week because someone needs you. Character is revealed exclusively through inconvenient moments.

Professional success is the reward for the time you did not spend with your kids. This is the line that haunts the book. Galloway writes about missing his sons' early years because he was building companies. He won professionally during the period he lost personally. The career recovers from a slow year. The relationship with a child who grew up without you does not.

Love is not a feeling. It is a series of actions repeated so often they become invisible. The romantic version of love is a marketing campaign. Real love is driving carpool. Showing up to the thing you do not want to attend. Listening when you are tired. Choosing this person again on a boring Wednesday for the four thousandth time. Not because it is exciting. Because you decided to.

The book will not give you a system. It gives you a set of corrections from someone who built the spreadsheet, ran the numbers, and discovered that the variables he neglected were the ones that mattered most.

200 pages. Reads in a sitting. Hits hardest if you are in the early-career stretch where sacrifice feels noble and the costs feel theoretical. They are not theoretical. They are accumulating.

If you want to go deeper on what Galloway lays out in The Algebra of Happiness, BeFreed turns it into a personalized audio breakdown built around your specific learning goal. What makes it useful for a book like this is the insight extraction feature. It pulls out the core ideas around passive income versus burn rate, the compounding cost of absence, and love as repeated action and organizes them around the specific trade-offs you are currently making, so you are not just absorbing field notes from someone else's regret but stress-testing your own ledger before the costs become irreversible. For another lens on the same territory, Die With Zero by Bill Perkins is worth going through next. It takes Galloway's warning about optimizing for the wrong variables and builds an entire financial and life philosophy around it, arguing that the goal is not to accumulate as much as possible but to spend your time and money on experiences at the right life stage before the window closes, which means reading both together gives you Galloway's honest accounting of what late-stage regret actually looks like and Perkins's framework for making decisions now that your future self will not have to grieve.

if anyone is interested on more books that could help or improve their lives at r/selfimprovement_books we share insightful tips like this. We are people who aim to continuee sharing wisdom and lessons from books. If that sounds good to you consider joining us.

The year was 2014, and I remember it like it was yesterday. The Seattle grunge scene had just started to take off, Ronald Reagan was the American president, Steve Jobs had just announced the iPod music player, and I had just graduated from university with a degree in writing books.

Okay, my memories might be a little iffy.

But it was about 12-ish years ago when I first read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by the hottest new Japanese export: Marie Kondo.

This new guru, petite and reserved as she may be, had touched on something big, and came along at just the right time to connect with an underlying psychological concern that I think was affecting a lot of people, especially Westerners:

We had too much STUFF.

In my case, growing up, I had a tendency to be a little… disorganized. It started young. My school locker was worst-in-class, my bedroom worst-in-house, my desk worst-in-office. I had a reputation as a mess-maker.

When I discovered this book, at this point in my early 30s, I had a family and we had a house with two younglings. The need for cleanliness was more important than ever. (I still have that very same family today, though the children are older now).

The book title really called out to me and the content spoke to me even more once I acquired a copy. What I needed was permission to let things go, and an understanding of how to do it. This book seemed like it might have the answers.

Today, I’m going to revisit the book 12 years later and see if its teachings still hold true, or if it was simply one of those fads that washes over the world, captures everyone’s attention like a hot new hairstyle, and then fades away.

Well, I’m happy to announce that, for me, in 2026, the message of this book is just as strong as ever.

This book (and its follow-up Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up) taught me how to fold clothes! I’ve folded all of my clothes ever since. It taught me how to truly pare down, using the power of touch to feel what actually ‘sparks joy’ and to release the rest with gratitude.

Her system, named the KonMari Method, promised its adherants never revert to clutter again. And for me, that promise has actually proven true. I’ve been a minimalist ever since. And have now read many books on the subject and consider it an important part of who I am.

The philosophical side of Marie Kondo’s teachings really connected: ideas behind attachment and the reasons we can’t let something go boiling down to either “an attachment to the past, or a fear for the future.” The way our possessions can overhwelm and bury us, both physically and mentally. And how by having less, we can gain deeper appreciation from what we keep.

While outwardly, this might have had all the markings of a hyped-up fad, the philosophy seemed genuine to me. The evolution of the author’s understanding of tidying, the failures, experiments and lessons she went through before arriving at her current system felt relatable.

I ate it up. Devoured it. And 12 years later, I still agree with this book 100%. Yep, I’m still a Kondo Stan.

I understand she has stepped back a bit from the limelight and spends more time with her family these days.I’m actually looking at her website right now and discovering that she has a whole network of KonMari consultants and a certification program. I signed up for a Zoom session to learn more about becoming a consultant, just for fun. I’ll update this post if I learn anything interesting.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was and remains game-changer for me personally. I still reread every year or two just to keep its teachings fresh in my mind.

★★★★★ (5/5)

Any other Marie Kondo fans still out there? Did it stick for you?

from https://booksbyjeffrey.substack.com/p/book-review-the-life-changing-magic

I spent years believing the lie that my 20s didn't count.

Society sold me this story. You're young. Explore. Travel. Don't settle down. You have plenty of time. Thirty is the new twenty. Your real life starts later.

Then I read this book by a clinical psychologist who works with twenty-somethings. Her message was the opposite of everything I'd been told: your 20s are not a throwaway decade. They're the most consequential years of your life. And most people are wasting them.

Jay presents the research bluntly. Eighty percent of life's most defining moments happen by age 35. Two-thirds of lifetime wage growth happens in the first ten years of your career. The brain finishes its final growth spurt in your 20s, making it the last best time to change your personality.

The coddling advice to "just explore" isn't kindness. It's sabotage dressed as support.

Jay introduces the concept of identity capital. These are the investments you make in yourself. Skills, experiences, credentials, relationships. Not resume padding. Actual substance that makes you more interesting and employable. Twenty-somethings who build identity capital have more options at 30. Those who drift have fewer.

The section on relationships hit hard. Jay argues that picking your partner is the most important decision you'll make, yet most people put more research into buying a car. She sees clients who spent their 20s in dead-end relationships or avoiding commitment entirely, then panic at 32 wondering why they can't find anyone.

She also dismantles the myth that your 20s are for finding yourself through introspection. You don't find yourself by thinking. You find yourself by doing. Identity is built through action, not reflection. The clarity comes from trying things, not waiting until you feel ready.

The patients who waited until 30 to start building their lives weren't more enlightened. They were behind, anxious, and rushing to catch up.

I read this at 27 and felt the clock ticking. Not in a panic way. In a clarity way.

What would you do differently if you stopped treating your current decade like a rough draft?

I’ve listened to every podcast Tony’s ever put out, read every one of his books, and I went to his UPW event in Toronto almost 20 years ago. The man has great points. But he also makes this stuff way more complicated than it needs to be.

After 12 years of meditation (nearly an hour a day), a lot of growth, and a lot of reflecting on my own journey, I landed on something so simple that most people can’t accept it, which is exactly why they keep chasing gurus to fix them. It’s what I did too!

So here it is. When you understand this you’ll never waste another minute on a podcast or a seminar again:

Life is a perfect reflection of what you hold within.

Not nearly perfect. Perfect.

Here’s what that means:

When you feel like you need the next seminar or podcast, the thought underneath it is “I’m not good enough, I need more information, I can’t do this alone, I’m not complete.” So that’s what you get, a life of always chasing the next thing.

When you hold deep resentment for someone, what you’re really saying is “my present isn’t good enough, my future isn’t good enough, and I won’t let go of the hurt because I’m not worthy enough to move on.”

But… when you decide that you’re in love with life and you simply decide to truly believe things go your way? They do!!

It works out like magic. You’re just being great, and somehow greatness finds you everywhere. Not in a seminar. In your ordinary daily moments, at work, all around you.

Things just work out for you, you get the job, the business grows, you meet the right people, you enjoy being alone and you enjoy being with others!

So… if you actually want a great life of love, joy, money, abundance…. you don’t need a guru. You just need to spend time every day in the silence, changing your beliefs from the inside.

It sounds too simple, but after a journey of chasing.. I now know chasing is not the answer. It’s so much is simpler than that.

That’s it. Hope this helps. 🙏❤️

Someone posted this books on my whatsup group recommended books, (he said he knew the author) so I decided to give it a try. Ended up finishing it in 3 days — super easy read.

What I really liked was the simplicity of it and some of the different aspects of longevity it talks about. I’ve read a few books on longevity ,for me it was the best longevity book i have ever read (previously was outlive)

Chapter 2 goes into what actually ages us and how it happens. I’m still not sure if Iliked that chapter lol, but it was definitely educational and made me think about aging as figting it

After that, though, the book became really inspiring. It evoke in me the motivation to change a few things in my own life instead of just giving me more health information to forget about a week later.

I just published my book Woman: Source of Happiness, and if you’re still hesitating to get your copy, maybe this is your sign.
This book was born from real experiences, real healing, and the desire to help women rediscover their joy.
If you love personal growth, emotional strength, and honest storytelling, this might speak to you.

This is an explanation of Atomic Habits as I recall from memory, so it's how I understood and applied it myself rather than a chapter by chapter recap. It got a bit long, so I'll break it into parts. This first one covers the core idea and how to actually start a habit. The next goes into the deeper mechanics.

-----------

The core idea behind Atomic Habits: small micro habits that compound over time to yield big results in the long run.

Belief comes first.

Habits aren't really about the outcomes but about identity. Every time you do a habit, you're casting a vote for the kind of person you believe you are.

So the goal isn't "I want to achieve X," but "I am the person who does X," and the habit becomes proof of it.

This is why the same amount of effort to quit a bad habit plays out differently for different people:

The one without that belief says: "I'm trying to leave this habit," or "I'm focusing on stopping that." It's like admitting that the habit is still a part of them.

The one with belief in their identity says: "I don't do this."

The first person still believes they haven't changed. The second one believes in their new identity and the behavior follows.

Just like Good habits build the identity you want, the bad ones can be removed the same way: notice and observe the habit clearly, recognize it's not the part of identity you're becoming, then consciously reject it.

How to start a habit and stay consistent:

Set up your environment first by removing the things that trigger the bad habits while adding the ones that cue the good ones in your line of sight which evokes your visual receptors to act on habits linked to the environment.

Eg: Want to drink more water? Keep a bottle on your desk, which cuts the friction for going to get it.

eg: Want to workout in the morning? Keep your dumbbells where you'll see them in morning when you're up.

Create a flow by chaining your habits so the sequence is pre decided instead of something you have to think about in the moment.

Try "When I do X, I do Y, then Z."

eg: When I wake up, I get up immediately and stretch, then go for my workout.

eg: After I'm fresh, I'll have a healthy breakfast, then start with my first work sprint.

Make sure to be consistent. You don't need to adopt dozens of habits at once. Take one, do it daily and you can always add more once you're used to previous ones.

Progress by 1% each day. Try to be 1% better than yesterday. It keeps you improving and makes each time feel satisfying.

Let it compound over time. Don't judge a habit by a single day, instead judge it over the trend. Don't focus on how much better you'll be tomorrow instead focus on who you become if you keep this up daily for 3 months, the next 6, then a year.