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Willpower
Willpower
Oct 7, 2024 1:30 PM

Author:Roy F. Baumeister,John Tierney,Denis O'Hare,Roy F. Baumeister,John Tierney

Willpower

Brought to you by Penguin.

Can you resist everything except temptation? In a hedonistic age full of distractions, it's hard to possess willpower - or in fact even understand why we should need it. Yet it's actually the most important factor in achieving success and a happy life, shown to be more significant than money, looks, background or intelligence. This book reveals the secrets of self-control.

Here Roy Baumeister, one of the world's most esteemed and influential psychologists, and journalist John Tierney, turn this notion on its head. They show us that willpower is like a muscle that can be strengthened with practice and improved over time. The latest laboratory work shows that self-control has a physical basis to it and so is dramatically affected by simple things such as eating and sleeping - to the extent that a life-changing decision may go in different directions depending on whether it's made before or after lunch. Based on years of psychological research and filled with practical advice, this book will teach you how to gain from self-control without pain, and discover the very real power in willpower. The results are nothing short of life-changing.

Reviews

This is an absorbing, mind-enlarging book, studded with insights ... Could have significant real-world results.

—— James McConnachie , Sunday Times

An entertaining survey of how science from brain scans to psychological tests is helping inspire pedagogy. Dehaene challenges many tropes [and] describes much of his own pioneering work ... Well translated from the French with some touching references to his upbringing, from the cult film La Jetée to the writing of Daniel Pennac.

—— Andrew Jack , Financial Times

An expert overview of learning ... Dehaene's fourth insightful exploration of neuroscience will pay dividends for attentive readers.

—— Kirkus

Ferrazzi brilliantly shows how building mutually beneficial partnerships marks the future of all work, and demonstrates how anyone can lead if they're willing to make themselves vulnerable and put the project mission and their partners first, turf and hierarchy last

—— Kristin Yetto, chief people officer at eBay

A brilliant, unique approach to building relationship capital by creating trusting and lasting human connection, not merely digital contact-inside and outside your company

—— Peter Guber, co-owner of the Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Los Angeles FC

A masterful guide to thriving in today's very weird workplace . . . Get this right, and it doesn't matter that the business world is roiled by change and disruption

—— Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof, New York Times bestselling author of The Bulletproof Diet

Ferrazzi has gone into the trenches to figure out what it really takes to empower people and make teams more than the sum of their parts. This book will be a staple in every leader's library

—— Adam Grant, host of the TED podcast WorkLife, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take and Originals

In Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg explains how actions as simple as flossing one tooth, opening up a book to the first page, or connecting with others can put us on the path to lasting change. Deeply researched and highly practical, this book will be a valuable resource to anyone interested in changing their behavior (that is, all of us)

—— Gretchen Rubin, author of 'The Happiness Project'

Exploring true stories of gay men over several generations...lays bare the trauma that coming out and living your truth has for all queer people. Heartbreaking, enlightening but much needed.

—— Niven Govinden

Poignant and achingly beautiful

—— New York Times

If this book and Brad Pitt walked into a bar, and I could only pick one, I'd take the book home with me

—— Nancy Lublin, Former CEO, Crisis TextLine and DoSomething.Org

Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas have written a remarkable book for a remarkable moment in history. I long ago learned that when weighed down by serious matters, one may best be taken seriously by seeking out a certain light-heartedness as an expression of humility, optimism and confidence on the road to the serious business of nurturing trust and leading others

—— Joel Peterson, Chairman of Jetblue Airways

This myth-busting, grin-inducing, data-driven humdinger of a book simply nails what I've clung on to for years: that humour can be more than ephemeral entertainment. When appropriately curated, it creates the right culture for success. In fact, its absence should be a cause for concern. You may eat your five a day and walk ten thousand steps but when did you last check if there was enough laughter in your life, in your team, in your business? If you had a centuries-old tried and tested tool that enhances rapport, creativity, collaboration, resilience, leadership, mental and physical health, sales and more - why wouldn't you use it?

—— Neil Mullarkey Author, speaker, improviser and Co-founder, London’s Comedy Store Players

I've been a comedian for ages, and this book has finally convinced me that joking around can actually be important and helpful.

—— Ed Gamble

Along the way the anonymised author, AK Benjamin, offers funny and unsettling insights into the vagaries of the relationship between clinicians and patients

—— Colin Grant , New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

A creative account of a life with little sleep… Readers looking for their own cure will instead find an erudite companion to help them through the dark times.

—— Helen Davies , Sunday Times

It's funny, sad, wry, always worrying away at the mystery of sleep and its absence and finding endless new angles so that the whole has something of the quality of those waking dreams that haunt the insomniac and are her private country.

—— Andrew Miller

A slim, intense memoir about her own year-long experience of nocturnal unrest… a torture Harvey describes with a combination of desperation, wry humour and — despite the scarcity she is subjected to — a deeply felt sense of life’s abundance… [her] proseglows off the page: an exacting inquisition of the self leading to imperfect peace.

—— Catherine Taylor , Financial Times

[Harvey is] brilliant on words and the nature of writing.

—— Roger Alton , Daily Express

[With The Shapeless Unease] Harvey has certainly proved that insomnia, as much as any of the more obviously nasty diseases, might be as worthy a subject of literature as love, battle or jealousy…her book rises to that level.

—— Jake Kerridge , Sunday Telegraph

[A] bravely exposing deep dive into the emotional murk of her [Havey’s] restless mind….[it] reveals…the irresistible writerly impulse to pin experience to the page.

—— Anthony Cummins , i

[The Shapeless Unease] reads like a dream sequence… Even reading this made me feel dizzy… [Harvey is] a vigorous, eloquent writer… she conveys the way sleeplessness takes you into the death zone of life.

—— Ysenda Maxtone Graham , Tablet

Mesmerising…at times, bitingly funny… [The Shapeless Unease is] an engrossing portrait of the fragility of identity and coherency in the grip of insomnia. I hadn’t read Harvey before this, but her facility with language here captivated me and I’ll be seeking out her novels next.

—— Valerie O’Riordan , Bookmunch

Urgent and full of arresting images and insights.

—— Stephanie Cross , Lady

[The Shapeless Unease] is littered with sharp insights expressed in exquisitely lucid prose but is as amorphous as its title suggests.

—— Keiron Pim , Spectator

It’s a claustrophobic, enlightening, moving, existential treatise on sleep, insomnia and death. And it’s funny, too.

—— Sadie Jones , Guardian

I wish I had saved The Shapeless Unease to read in isolation but Samantha Harvey’s book about insomnia, time, death and so many unknowable things is a blessing to have in lonely times. It is a profound and stunning book but funny, too.

—— Fatima Bhutto , Evening Standard

A beautiful, jagged little book about insomnia and so many unknowable things: life and death, Buddhism, and how language alters our thinking. But I was most struck by its form and structure.

—— Fatima Bhutto , New Statesman

[Samantha Harvey's] cerebral, startlingly clear account of somehow pulling through [from insomnia] carries an electric charge and meditates on not only the mystery of sleep but also writing, swimming and dreams.

—— Net-a-Porter

[The Shapeless Unease] is beautifully crafted and its achievement makes itself more apparent on a second reading.

—— Richard Gwyn , Wales Art Review

A masterpiece, so good I can hardly breathe. I'm completely floored by it.

—— Helen Macdonald

This book seems appropriately messy-haired and wild-eyed... Anyone who has lain awake the night before a big test will recognize such manic flourishes. Harvey captures the 4 a.m. bloom of magical thinking; stories proliferate within stories... To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases.

—— Katy Waldman , New Yorker
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