Books, Professional Development

Book 277: The Willpower Instinct – Kelly McGonigal

This wasn’t one of the original self-help books I set out to read this year, but one that I randomly found on the library shelf while looking for another book and I’m glad I snagged it. In case you missed it, I’ve just wrapped up a 10 week project following this book’s program and you should check it out. I’ve also linked to each of the individual posts at the end of this post.

The book started out slower than I thought it would, but as I followed her instructions and spread it out over the ten weeks, a week per chapter, I found that it was laid out perfectly. Even though I struggled with how slow the implementation of the first bit was, it seriously helped lay the foundations for the later chapters. McGonigal clearly knows her subject matter and set it up in a way to slowly build on every thing until you were ready to tackle the more philosophical/psychological aspects.

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Personal Project, Willpower

The Willpower Instinct Project – Week 8, 9 & Wrap-Up

McGonigal, Kelly - The Willpower InstinctAs I said two weekends ago I was struggling to finish up the project. I did finish reading the book and the review will post tomorrow, but I just had a couple of rough weekend sin a row and didn’t take the time to blog about the last two chapters. This’ll be a quick recap of those chapters and my final thoughts on the project.

Chapter 8: Infected: Why Willpower is Contagious focused primarily on how your willpower project isn’t just yours alone. We were told to spend time identifying when/if other people affected how we approached challenges. Do the people we identify with or want to be like help or hinder our process? The experiments for the week were to take a few minutes to remind ourselves of the goals every morning, find a positive role model, go public with the our challenge and find others to support you.

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2014 Challenges, Books, The Classics Club

Book 276: Dracula – Bram Stoker

Welcome back Classic Club! I apparently needed a four, almost five, month break from the club. There wasn’t a specific reason other than perhaps the epic-ness of War and Peace, but I’m glad I took the break. I think this was an even better break because I came back with such a wonderful book! There were so many cool things that I learned that I didn’t know, or some how avoided knowing, came from Dracula!

I thought for sure I was familiar with the plot of Dracula, we all are aren’t we? But I was so wrong! I’ve never seen a film version of this and most of what I know is what pop culture has co-opted over the years. One of my favorite podcasts, Good Job Brain, even did an episode titled Very Superstitious which included a lot of fun trivia (some I think might’ve been wrong) about the myriad versions of Dracula. However, what I found out that most caught me off guard was that although the book was about Dracula he wasn’t the main character AND there was a bad ass female protagonist who rocked. There are spoilers, the book is over 120 years old so get over it! 😀

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Updates

April 2014 Recap

2014 04-03 Visit to the BooksmithI couldn’t start two monthly recaps in a row with book typos (don’t worry there is one), but I do apologize in advance, this is another long post!

so instead I thought I would start with one of my #100happydays photos. I took this photo on day three when I went down to sell some of my read books during lunch. Shockingly I only came away with two books (one a present) and ordered a third! Again, you’ll hear more about those later.

Let’s see, what else has happened this month? I had an AWESOME nerdy weekend a few weekends ago and loved every minute of it, even though it was exhausting. I started dating again. I ran a 5k and crossed running a sub-36:00 5k off my 30 x 30 list. As I mentioned last month, I launched a new blog (launch post) with my best friend from growing up called Now Entering Adulthood (actual link) about our last few months of our twenties and the first few of our thirties. Oh AND I created a Tumblr [Deleted January 2025] to compile my writings on both blogs and my Instagram pictures together! And well generally I had a great month!

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ARC, Books

Book 275: Love Comes Home (Senses #3) – Andrew Grey

Welcome to my first ever participatory post in a blog tour 😀 I wasn’t really sure what that entailed, but once I found out it wasn’t far outside of my normal posts (with the addition of a few links at the bottom), I figured why not!

I requested a copy of this novel from the Dreamspinner Press and within the first 50 pages I knew I wanted to find out more about Andrew Grey. When I looked into him, I found out this was the third in the series! I immediately reached out to his publicist to see if I could get access to the first two and they kindly obliged. Last week you will, hopefully, have seen my reviews of Love Comes Silently and Love Comes in Darkness and I am glad to say Love Comes Home did NOT disappoint. I will say, as usual, take my review, and all of the others on Goodreads with a grain of salt. I unfortunately made the mistake of checking a few out and got frustrated as usual. This is my honest opinion and I received no compensation for it.

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