The Achievement Habit audiobook

I really enjoyed this book. Some books have a great message but are a chore to read. Some are easy reads but don't have great content. This book has both. There were so many great messages, like reasons are often just excuses that keep us from doing the things we really want to do. There are also tips on how to get unstuck - the author explains that you have to change the way you think about a problem - and then he tells you how to do that using "design thinking." He also provides 22 creative strategies to use when you're stuck. In each chapter, he includes a section called "Your Turn" where he provides exercises you can do to apply what you've just read. I didn't do them all, but I did the ones in the areas where I most needed help and found them very effective.A few quotes from the book I particularly liked:"You can make a decision right now to see yourself differently, and then to become different." This was a good reminder to me that the past does not have to equal the future. If there's an area we'd like to change, we can....and..."Nothing is what you think it is." His point was that WE give things their meaning....and..."It's not about me." This thought comes in handy when we find ourselves thinking that other people's actions are related to what we did or did not do. Their actions are usually about them & what's going on in their lives, not us.Loved the book!

** spoiler alert ** We all have great dreams or wishes but we rarely work hard for those dreams. Most of the time it stays only as dreams. If you have this problem this book is really a good medicine. Mr Roth explains in this book how you can change yourself to a doer and achiever. How you can get rid of the habit of making excuses. How to ignore distractions and pay more attention to our goal. The first three chapters are really important, I would say the best part of the book. Worth reading, this book remind me what Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam said about dreams " Dream is not what you see in sleep. It is something which doesn't let you sleep."

This morning I set out to make banana bread. The recipe called for two eggs and I only had one. I had a gooood reason to stop right there. Instead, I googled an egg substitute made with baking powder and water. It worked and the bread was tasty.

I used to think self-help books are cheesy with overly optimistic messages but you know what? I'm at the age where I need that good cheesy motivational stuff because ADULTING IS HARD. In fact, holding onto a carefree positive outlook is way harder than having a pessimistic cynical one. Actually being pessimistic was my default state. This book came into my life at the right time, late December in 2016 just before the new year. To say that I was stuck in a rut in 2016 is an understatement. I saw its bright yellow cover at a library shelf and without thinking much, just borrowed it. What I didn't know is how much it helped me to reset my way of thinking and teach me how to focus. Despite its very bombastic title, the voice of this book is very calming and implores your rational side. In fact, it is more angled to helping you achieve or complete a task rather than take you on a spiritual or emotional self-help journey. So if you want something that inspires you emotionally or makes you feel connected to something bigger, like the universe or something, this is NOT the book for you! I actually preferred it this way because I am very cynical and any mention of New Age-y concepts would make me shut my brain completely. The author is a Stanford professor and runs a Creativity Workshop where he teaches students and professionals how to plan, design and execute whatever they wanted! I swear, rich people get to do a ton of fun shit. For me, I always believe that you take what you need from self-help books and leave whatever that doesn't apply to you. There are some parts in the book that don't necessarily apply to me but the ones that did? Hit me like a ton of bricks. There are so many moments when I was reading this book where I wished I had read it earlier. One of the messages that really hit me is "you give everything its meaning" or everything has no meaning. That sounds kind of nihilistic or even self-centred but the wisdom behind it is that, things only become important to you because you chose it to be important. A certain thing, person or value has meaning because you grant that meaning to it in your life. This really helps me because I'm so easily distracted and I tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to almost everything. Add the crazy world we live in where we get breaking news at the end of our fingertips, and also aggravating comments from ignorant people, and you will get a very frazzled me in 2016. Last year, I felt like I was in a whirlwind because I was reacting to everything. It's only then when I realised I can choose what I should pay attention to, when it's not worth the fuss and how to push it aside so it won't ruin my day. It seems simple. The message is simple and I've probably read or heard some derivative of that before but I needed to hear it at that time and presentation also matters. I also like how the author is not against failure but also reminds us that we are still capable of creating change, even how minute, and not everything is dependent on external factors. Again, these points are not things that you've never heard before, and you may already think it's common sense, but sometimes you need to hear it that from someone else. There are other great points in here but I will let you decide if this is worth the read. For me, I am really thankful that I get to read this because it didn't occur to me that my issues are manageable and not even unique. I'm usually a faster reader but I took my time here and I'm racking up quite the library late penalty fee. I am definitely getting my own copy of this book.

Roth is one of the co-founders of the Stanford d.school, one of the originators of design thinking, and a professor of mechanical engineering for 40 years. His book is indeed partly about achievement. More than that, it’s a collection of life wisdom from a very smart, accomplished doer, maker, and teacher who has figured out how to get results from himself and students. Foremost in Roth’s teachings is bias towards action. Instead of waffling and ruminating, “don’t get caught up in how you’re going to get it just right. That’s what causes people to shut down and never get started. Avoid the desire for perfection right out of the gate. Instead, tell yourself that you’re prototyping your screenplay or your dress. The final version can come later.”Some of his suggestions may seem radical, but they’re just part of standard d.school curriculum, e.g. getting rid of reasons for doing things. You don’t need them, and they’re all bogus anyway: “Many reasons are simply excuses to hide the fact that we are not willing to give something a high enough priority in our lives.” Substitute all manifestations of “but” with “and.” When you gather up your intention and concentrate your attention, you will move mountains. There’s a ton of actionable advice here, such as a list of 22 ways to get unstuck (e.g. lists, idea logs, humor, conversation, exercise, compressed conflict, mind maps, working backward), and the “Your Turn” exercises at the end of each section. This is a tremendously useful and encouraging book for anyone whose creative endeavors could use some more bias towards action. -- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Happiness Engineer and author of The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible, the highest-rated dating book on Amazon for 4 years, and Should I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine

A must-read book that is difficult to summarize in a few words. We are talking about the experience of an experienced man, Bernard Roth, in engineering and robotics who has had a rather atypical life course with very important life lessons that we all meet or will meet. But this life experience is used to give us relevant advice for progress that we find in some personal development books... but this is not a guru talking, it is relevant life advice that they give us to progress or when we find ourselves facing a wall. We are talking about creativity, teaching, motivation (for us but especially to motivate our work team), behavioural attitudes, emulation, communication and so much more, this book is so complete, essential and striking by its humility that I rarely find in the vast majority of leadership or motivational books. It is a book full of depth and it deserves this personal comment.

It’s not enough just to know things, we have to act, take the responsibility of navigating the unchartered territories of the game of life. We have to step out of our comfort zone, take appropriate risks, believe in ourselves and, always aware of our strengths, face the unknown. Only in this way can we travel the journey of life, overcoming obstacles, towards the goal, and achieve the subjective success of our existence.
Inspiring book!

If you are looking for a self help book, this is a good one to start with. Good, basic guidelines. It is somewhat autobiographical, but overall, I like his ideas.

The core of this book is all about how to make your achievement a habit and so habits in turn will lead us to practice them on the positive side and lead us to successful path. Author highlights that failures on our endeavors can be taken as step stone towards our goal in achievements and give a meaning to those failures which comes in the path. Anything can be achieved but it may not be always successful in the first attempt. At times, it may need several iterations to get the fruit out of it. It is all about our perception towards a particular thing that fakes us and lead to an unsuccessful path. We need to changes these perceptions and ensure we believe that we can do and we can achieve. I liked the 4 step process recommended by a neuro professor from Harvard university that helps us to handle any sort of situations. These steps helps us to escape from what our brain fakes us with the perception. When we are in a situation to handle a big problem, as a 1st step stop thinking about that and take a deep breath and try to understand who we are and how we can tackle the same and realize how we feel now and then try to recall some past event that we felt happy about. These simple steps deviate us from the problematic perception and refreshes our brain to think about it in a more positive way. Most of the times, people do fail just because they don't attempt further on to break those hurdles. Author says reasons are just lame excuses and skip them and take the full responsibility for our behavior. This way if we stop these lame excuses and take full responsibility then it changes our behavior towards the problem solving approach and helps us to live a productive life. Be confident on actions and trust them. Most of the time we used to have a wrong way of understanding the problem and this creates chaos and leads us into wrong path. First try to understand the nature of the problem and then it automatically leads us to the right path and understanding the problem more deeper helps us to give optimal solution to the problem. This emphasizes that we always ensure to work on the real problem. Author hints lot of ways on how to get unstuck from the problem once we understand the real problem. Few to highlight here are hard work, creating a supportive environment, relaxing, brainstorming, having several what-if questions, storyboards, how-why diagrams, mind maps etc., Once you get the problem solving way, it is all about putting them into action. Doing is everything. Author differentiates on what is trying with that of doing. Doing something means we intend to get the job done and we bring the attention towards fulfilling the intention. Author Roth, highlights reading habit are step stones towards small successes. Don't dream about changes, rather implement them on action. Author lists out some suggestions for good interpersonal communications, among which one thing that was catchy is Acknowledge other people's issues. People want to know that you heard them and acknowledge them that you heard their problems and don't try to solve them unless or until they explicitly ask you for. Further author highlights about working in teams or groups. This helps us to be more flexible and tolerant and helps the team to be more cohesive and effective in problem solving and gets more productive. Author explains about different types of prototypes and how they helps us towards our way to success. 3 major prototypes are conceptual prototypes, feasibility prototypes and functional prototypes. Keep focussing on problem solving and motivation plays the key role towards success. Let it be anything, be the case in that matter and take full responsibility. This book is worthy for its tips but a lot of elaborated examples makes it a bit lengthy. Still I would rate it with 4 stars.

In this book the author Bernard gives several ideas to cultivate achievement habit by doing several exercises. First he explains on design thinking that is if you faced any problem follow the 5 steps such as what is the issue, define the problem clearly, sketch the idea to overcome from that, create prototype and finally test and get feedback from others.Then in each chapter he is explaining several steps to create achievement habit such as train your brain, don't give excuses and don't give reasons - this will make you stupid and these won't allow you to achieve your goal. Draw mind map, find assistance - no one succeeded alone. All successful people achieved in their life with others help. So get help from others and learn from others. Finally saying don't try or over think about the goal just start do something related to your goal. Over thinking on your goal won't help you to succeed. Only if you start doing something then you will be succeeded. He also insist that we need to concentrate on our language skills while speaking itself we should show our positive mindset. Speak with heart. He also giving several exercises to find our own self image and convert your negative habits to positive one. At last he is telling if you facing more problems in your life means you are getting more opportunities to show case your talent. So take the problem as a challenge and solve it. It is a good book to read.

It’s a really good book we can learn lot about how to develop achievement habits. This book really gave me some good idea and different perspective of my life. One of the best example i love about this book is “ A Person want to decided to watch a movie but the tickets at counter are over, he is being trying to buy extra ticket from other. And Check for any cancellation Ticket. Finally he'll watch that movie” This is called “Achievement”, you have to try hard until the end without giving up on the thing you want to do. Some Important Lesson i learnt from this Book are1) If you have any unsolved Problem / work has to be done very long. Follow this Steps to approach it done/Solve 1. Understand what is the core problem2. Define the Exact Problem, or Work3. Ideate the Work4. Prototype it Working model5. Test it with people2) Difference between Do and Try, Trier’s ll quit if they find the block or problem, Doer’s ll Solve the Problem they are face and make sure the work done3) And Work like Every day is last day of your life and perfect Analogy he gave is “what ll you do if you have only 10 mins to live ?” “What ll you do if you have only 10 hours to live ?” This question help to see the real things you want in life.4) Don’t Seek for any good reason for not doing the work.5) Alway be proactive instead of Reactive One of the Best Book i ever read.

This is a revised version of my review. I posted it in a hurry and for the next hour I was not feeling good about what I’ve written. Later I realised I forgot to follow the ‘Constructive criticism’ advice that was explained in the book and which I really liked and find quite useful. So, the 'like-wish' rule. What I liked in the book? First, the real life stories - from them you can see that the author has huge experience and is not afraid of self-reflection. Second, that the author is giving a lot of thought on how to teach in a better way, often questioning the status quo. My teaching experience is nothing to compare, so this is inspirational and an example to follow. Now to the ‘I wish’ part. I wish there was more of design thinking in a book.(the initial review)Friends suggested I buy the book while we were visiting Stanford bookstore. I am facilitating groups using Design Thinking so I was excited to learn on application of the method to personal life.Even though the author mentions design thinking a few times (maybe 7 out of 257 pages), it felt more as a book of ‘stories of my life’/self-help book I was not looking for to read. I finished the book pretty fast and in general it is an easy read.

Good ideas. Inspiring. And (notice how I'm following Roth's instructions and using and in place of but) uneven: after a great beginning, the middle section seemed to me a bit all over the place with interesting exercises but not connected enough to each other. In all, I liked this book and got some new fuel for my personal growth, so I'm happy I read it.