In contrast to the loud, glossy covers of the self-help section, these books are tastefully designed, with blurbs from Malcolm Gladwell and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, but in essence, they aren’t so different from the works of Napoleon Hill or Norman Vincent Peale. In other words, I hope that these books will change my life, even if they inevitably leave me no more creative or rational than before. These are all smart books you wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen carrying at a TED conference, but when I buy them, I’m secretly hoping to improve more than my conversation: I want to become more rational, more creative, more interesting. In addition to Duhigg’s book, over the last few months alone I’ve happily devoured Imagine, by Jonah Lehrer, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, and The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, by Dan Ariely, which comes out today. As a novelist, I’ve always been a sucker for books on creativity and consciousness, and there’s been a bumper crop this season. Duhigg’s book is often insightful, but it’s being sold less on its merits as reportage than as a self-help book for a very specific demographic: an audience of affluent and educated readers who wouldn’t be caught dead buying, say, The Secret. Even if we buy into its larger point about the power of belief, the idea that the Colts didn’t just become better overall, but won a specific game because they believed in themselves, is oddly sentimental. Like the rest of the book, it’s persuasively argued-but the more we look at this illustration, the less convincing it seems. The Colts story appears in The Power of Habit as part of a longer discussion of the role of belief in habit formation. But Dungy’s players say it was because they believed, and because that belief made everything they had learned-all the routines they had practiced until they became automatic-stick, even at the most stressful moments.”
“Maybe they got lucky,” Duhigg wrote in his bestselling book The Power of Habit.
Charles Duhigg, a reporter at The New York Times, argues that they won because they finally came to believe in the strategy that Dungy had pursued for so long.
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