My name is Amy, and I’m a Candy Crush addict.

Whenever I pick up my phone, those brightly colored, glossy squares beckon, and I can easily squander 30 minutes mindlessly swiping at the screen. It’s soothing—and hugely unproductive. In Bored and Brilliant, Manoush Zomorodi argues that stepping away from technology is not just healthy, it is essential for creativity and productivity. Research shows that people are now shifting their focus every 45 seconds while working online due to interruptions and competing messages. But being constantly tethered to a phone or tablet is no way to treat our brains if we want to foster new ideas.

Zomorodi, who hosts the popular podcast “Note to Self,” writes, “Creativity—no matter how you define or apply it—needs a push, and boredom, which allows new and different connections to form in our brain, is a most effective muse.” More than 20,000 people around the world signed up when Zomorodi launched the Bored and Brilliant Project, a weeklong challenge to get people to disconnect from their gadgets and tune in to their own thoughts. Challenges like going photo-free for a day are all specifically designed to reconnect us with the world.

In this age of information, Zomorodi’s book seems revolutionary, almost subversive. Sprinkled liberally with research and insights from some of the leading minds in technology and futurism, Bored and Brilliant is an important reminder that we are not beholden to our devices. As for me, I’ve deleted the Candy Crush app from my iPhone . . . for now.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Manoush Zomorodi for Bored and Brilliant.

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s interesting that Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life is coming out in the fall instead of May or June. While this book would make a great gift for a recent graduate, it would also be a good read at the beginning of senior year, or any other time of transition. Anyone who practices the lessons put forth here has a lot to look forward to.

Enlarging on a popular class they teach at Stanford, professors and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Bill Burnett and Dave Evans use principles of design, from brainstorming to prototyping, and adapt them into a way of reconsidering and then reshaping your life.

The authors make job-hunting their primary focus but emphasize that this process can be applied to any issue. Sometimes it’s a matter of reframing a problem to open up more potential solutions, while in other situations, a closer look may reveal that you’re tackling a problem that’s not actionable. If that’s the case, fear not: The authors have a simple hack, which is to accept it and move on to the parts you can act on. A series of self-evaluation exercises includes looking closely at four life categories (health, work, play and love) before designing life prototypes and field-testing them.

Some of this may be familiar to fans of What Color Is Your Parachute? or even The Secret, but Burnett and Evans bring a fresh and practical design perspective to their career advice. As the authors note, “[I]t’s impossible to predict the future. And the corollary to that thought is: once you design something, it changes the future that is possible.” This hands-on guide will get you started, but what happens next is entirely up to you.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Melody Warnick was not loving where she lived. After moving to Blacksburg, Virginia, Warnick looked around with dismay. The trees were menacing. She knew no one. She had young children. She was tempted to stay in and binge-watch Netflix. But she decided to try to make herself fall in love with Blacksburg. This Is Where You Belong reveals the steps in her journey, which will be relevant to many of us. As Warnick points out, Americans are, and have been for some time, “geographically restless.”

Warnick establishes that she has “low place-attachment” through an inventory, which she includes for readers. To raise her depressingly low score, she devises and attempts various “Love Where You Live” experiments. What follows are 12 chapters about ways to dial up place affection: walking, eating local, buying local, getting to know neighbors. She traces the research that indicates why these activities are meaningful and often supplements her research by interviewing a place-making expert. Warnick knows how to make her interview subjects sparkle and brings together the various elements of the book with finesse. Back in Blacksburg, her experiments have her doing all manner of tasks, from delivering muffins to organizing a sidewalk chalk festival. 

The biggest pleasure of the book, though, is the way Warnick’s search will help readers reflect on their own locales. As someone who was already “deeply attached” to my place (according to the quiz), one might think I found little to take away. On the contrary, I gained fresh insight about why my hometown favorites—from food to friends to public places—make me more measurably connected to my city. I also found a handful of bright ideas to get to know it better. As far as experiments go, that’s a satisfying result.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you gravitate toward wholesome, “Dear Abby”-style advice, steer clear of Heather Havrilesky. But if profound, profane wisdom is your jam, this book is for you.

How to Be a Person in the World compiles some of Havrilesky’s best columns from “Ask Polly,” which ran first on quirky website The Awl, then on New York magazine’s The Cut. It also includes a lot of fresh material. Saying that Havrilesky has a way with words is like saying Marilyn Monroe liked diamonds. Havrilesky doesn’t just write—she dances with the words, building empathetic responses that can’t be classified as just advice columns. They are more keen observations of human behavior.

“When you spend your days staring at bony teenagers in tall boots and touching soft things that cost more than your monthly salary, it eats away at your soul like a hungry little demon-rabbit,” she writes to a woman working in fashion who feels miserable and shallow. 

“Repeat after me, WB: ‘I will not lose myself. I can earn money and create art, too. I can befriend Buddhists and women in $300 heels. I am not a one-dimensional, angry human with boundary issues, like those others who get so fixated on being ONE THING AND NOTHING ELSE.’”

It was hard to choose a favorite quote, mostly because she’s so pithy but also because so many of the quotes I loved in this book included a string of F words. 

The contents are divided into sections with titles such as Flaws Become You and Weepiness is Next to Godliness, each prefaced by a deadpan comic strip. 

Whether she’s tackling alcoholism, STDs or deadbeat boyfriends, Havrilesky is a pure joy to read. She’s the tough-love friend who tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. As she tells one advice seeker, “This is your moment. Seize your moment, goddamn it!”

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Grit seems to have been written for those who find the maxim “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” too pithy to be useful—thus the 352-page elaboration. A professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, author Angela Duckworth begins by exploring the distinction between “grit,” which she defines as a combination of passion and perseverance directed toward a goal, and natural talent, the ability to achieve a goal without excessive or prolonged effort. Grit will get you farther than talent alone, she maintains, adding that “talent is no guarantee of grit.”

Perhaps the fact that Duckworth’s Chinese immigrant father regularly told his children, “You’re no genius,” made the concept of grit more remarkable to her than it is to American kids who are routinely assured they can be anything they want to be if they work hard enough.  Whatever her inspiration, she anatomizes grit in great detail—how it can be grown from the inside out by reflective and persistent individual effort and from the outside in by parental and cultural nourishment. She clearly takes it as a given that right-thinking people will want to seek their personal best rather than settle for their personal adequate. To her, reaching and extending a goal is valuable in its own right, whether it’s something useful, such as becoming a more effective teacher, or something socially useless, such as swimming farther or faster than anyone did before. Achievement is her polestar.

In fairness, she might have noted that every day spent in grueling practice or apprenticeship—of exercising and perfecting grit—is a day lost to the exquisite pleasures of wool-gathering and cloud-gazing.  But that is not her world.

It’s been a few weeks since our New Year’s resolutions faded into obscurity, but most of us harbor a lingering hope that we can become more productive. In Smarter Faster Better, New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg breaks productivity into eight parts that improve performance in surprising ways. 

As in his bestseller The Power of Habit, Duhigg layers anecdotes, research and reporting, making potentially dry analysis compulsively readable. The tragic 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 happened because the pilots had become so dependent on the highly sophisticated flight display that they overlooked a fatal human error in their midst. By contrast, a similar plane was landed safely by a pilot who tuned out all the alarms and stripped his focus down to the parts of the plane that still worked and maximized his use of them. 

Chapters on teamwork, motivation, management and more illustrate their points through stories from the first season of “Saturday Night Live,” a Marine Corps training exercise, competitive poker and the Disney musical Frozen. An appendix helpfully shows readers how to translate these concepts into daily use. The “stick man” diagrams from The Power of Habit are back, clarifying points with often humorous visuals (check out the two tiny engineers toasting one another with cans of Mountain Dew). 

The Power of Habit showed readers how behavior is guided by cues and rewards; once you see the system, making small hacks comes naturally. Smarter Faster Better looks even deeper, with tips that can help fine-tune behavior, improve relationships at work and lead to better outcomes in a variety of settings, while somehow also being an edge-of-your-seat exciting read. Duhigg has done it again.

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Social work research professor Brené Brown is not your run-of-the-mill academic. Eschewing the ivory tower, Brown puts her research—enhanced by her personal story and the stories of others—out into the world for all to see (catch her TED talk on vulnerability—millions have!). She’s ready to rumble with the tough stuff of life, including failure, imperfection, vulnerability, shame and courage.  

This outspoken, “lock-and-load” Texan and best-selling author categorizes her previous two books as a “call to arms,” exhorting readers in The Gifts of Imperfection to “be you” and, in Daring Greatly, to “be all in.” Her latest book, Rising Strong, completes this triumvirate with an inspiring message: “Fall. Get up. Try again.”

Brown’s motivation for her research and writing is “to start a global conversation about vulnerability and shame.” This, she avows, is a step toward the authentic, wholehearted life we all yearn for.

There are three phases in Brown’s rising strong theory (“the reckoning, the rumble, the revolution”), which is predicated on the power of leaning in to our hurt, of not denying our stories. These tales are what we must “reckon” with, employing self-acceptance and curiosity to see essential truths about our lives. The second phase is to “rumble” with those truths, owning them and deciding how the story will play out. The third phase is nothing short of a “revolution” that signifies a life transformed and aligned with courage.

“Revolution,” says Brown, “might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance.” ¡Viva la revolución!

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Philippe Petit’s famous tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974 was just one of many such performances by the artist. He made the crossing without a permit or permission to be in the building, so it’s little wonder he thinks of his actions as “coups” and has titled his book Creativity: The Perfect Crime. This is not a how-to book—it’s more of a this-is-how-I primer—but close readers will come away with both inspiration and useful instruction.

Petit describes his process of amassing vast amounts of information and linking ideas together before a new project takes shape, storing these files in an imagined hiding place. This fanciful approach is a helpful counterpoint to the reality of practicing on the rope, or with the juggling balls and clubs, for hours daily. When plotting your own creative coup, he recommends choosing accomplices with more attention to their character than the skills they bring to the project. “Watch bank-heist movies. You’ll see that each time a coup fails, it is due to human error, human limitation, human betrayal.”

There are a few exercises suggested here, such as learning to balance on either foot while blindfolded, and doing tasks with your non-dominant hand. However, it’s more enjoyable to just watch Petit as he works, drilling for hours to learn a new juggling move, or using a giant calendar both to track progress on a project and spur him to keep at it. Small sketches and copied pages from his notebooks show how he’ll code an entry with small pictograms, then use colored markers or additional notations to chart how things progressed.

Each chapter has a single word that appears in blue; readers can finish the chapter or skip to the end to read a brief stand-alone discussion of, say, bullfighting or the Golden Mean. It’s a gimmick, but a fun one. Anyone curious about Petit’s life and art, or hoping to draw inspiration for their own creative coup, will find ideas and insights in Creativity: The Perfect Crime.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success is true to its title, flipping an entrenched view of success on its ear. Author Megan McArdle argues for the value of failure, not just in business but law enforcement, job hunting, even love. Writers like to toss around the Samuel Beckett advice to “fail better,” but what does that mean in practice?

McArdle, a popular business blogger who landed her dream job (and her husband!) through a series of missteps and adaptation to the unexpected, talks to experts in multiple fields about failure in theory, then illustrates with examples from current events and her own life. When solar manufacturer Solyndra was tanking, no one was able to admit defeat and pull the plug on federal spending. Failure to heed the warning signs led to far worse consequences for everyone involved.

An innovative probation reform program in Honolulu shows how a failed system’s mistakes can point toward a solution. People in the program are drug tested and given the instruction to come forward if they violate their probation. Speaking up leads to a shorter sentence—and saves taxpayers a fortune by eliminating mountains of paperwork. 

McArdle, an outspoken libertarian, may rankle some readers with her contrarian opinions, but she makes her points with clear prose and dry humor. Entrepreneurs, the unemployed and even the lovelorn will find sound advice here.

Journalist Oliver Burkeman cheerfully guides us through the power of negative thinking in his new book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. Culled from his popular Guardian column, this book’s central insight is that positive thinking doesn’t make anyone happier. In fact, chanting affirmations and focusing on success may undermine our happiness by reminding us how we fall short of it every day and in every way.

So what is the “negative path” to happiness? Mining a long and venerable philosophical tradition, Burkeman introduces us to a variety of approaches that encourage us to detach from our relentless pursuit of betterment. His epigraph from Alan Watt evokes the central paradox of this way of thinking: “When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float.” From the negative visualization of Greco-Roman Stoicism to the detachment of Buddhism, these schools of thought remind us that although we may not be able to control what happens to us, suffering is optional.

Although Burkeman dives into more contemporary New Age-y waters in his hilarious character assassination of The Secret, he admits to finding himself drawn to best-selling author Eckhart Tolle. Tolle’s philosophy, like much of contemporary Buddhism, encourages us to stop identifying with the self, if by “self” we mean those endless chattering voices in our minds. One of Tolle’s techniques that Burkeman finds himself using in daily life is the simple question: Do I have a problem right now? This reminds us that much of our anxiety concerns a future that hasn’t happened yet.

In other fascinating chapters, Burkeman looks at how goal-setting may have contributed to the tragic deaths on Mount Everest in 1996; how our post-9/11 preoccupation with security may be making us less safe; and how embracing failure, false starts and uncertainty may help us move forward in our lives. Burkeman’s book is indeed a witty antidote to the shelves of self-help books that don’t seem to help anyone but their authors; but it also has a serious purpose. Embracing uncertainty and detaching from our monkey-minds may help us become happier.

Move over, timing; you can’t be everything, because context is a pretty powerful something too! In his new book, Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World,Tufts University psychology professor Sam Sommers makes the case that context has an enormous influence on human behavior—and therefore tremendous impact on our lives. If we’re oblivious to these forces, we risk jumping to erroneous conclusions, unwisely conforming to the group or even convincing ourselves we’re “in love” when it’s only situation and circumstance causing our hearts to palpitate. But, he contends, armed with an understanding of the particular “frame” or situation, and an awareness of its power to push us in one direction or another, we can confidently make better decisions and be more effective personally and professionally. “When we look at situations objectively, detaching ourselves from the emotion and bias that often cloud our vision, we’re better able to pick up on the clues that allow us to understand other people and achieve the outcomes we seek.”

Sommers dexterously weaves research, anecdotes and his own marital sitcom-like experiences into a witty, narrative whole, as he helps us explore our human foibles and discover the invisible forces compelling our thoughts, choices and actions. In a chapter provocatively titled “You’re Not the Person You Thought You Were,” he explains that even self-perception is dependent on context: “Your sense of self varies depending on who you are with. Identity is malleable . . . but none of this is bad or distressing news.” It is empowering to consider yourself a flexible work in progress, he explains, because “who you are today need not dictate who you are tomorrow.” Rather than wasting time looking for your “inner self,” he prescribes “appreciating that you’re a different person in different settings.” He even finds a little self-deception, to “salve the wounds of negative feedback,” is wholesome if used in moderation, “like red wine, chocolate and Jim Carrey movies,” to help ourselves recover from setbacks and become happier and more successful.

Sommers’ book challenges us to think twice about long-held perceptions, to view the world through the lens of context and to realize just how much Situations Matter.