Books

Book 288: Veronika Decides to Die (And On the Seventh Day #2) – Paulo Coelho

I had a copy of The Devil and Miss Prym and planned to read it, but when I pulled it off the shelf I found out it was the part of the And On the Seventh Day trilogy after By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, which I’d read already, and Veronika Decides to Die. This is hilarious, because I definitely wrote about the trilogy in December of 2012, but either way I picked this up from the library earlier this week.

As I said last time, and I will probably say again, it’s been far too long since I last read anything by Coelho. I somehow let myself forget how beautiful his writing is and I can’t help but wonder how beautiful it must be in the original Portuguese! These are the same thoughts I think whenever I read Murakami, just imagine how beautiful it must be in the original language and credit clearly is clearly due to the translators! I can’t remember what author said it, but someone said that a work of translation is a different work and is just as artistic and I truly believe it with these two authors.

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Books

Book 280: An Unquiet Mind – Kay Redfield Jamison

After hours and hours of discussions about a personal relationship with someone who experiences bipolar disorder/manic depression and recommending I read this book on multiple occasions, my therapist finally made me take this book with me after an appointment one week and I’m glad she did. I won’t go into that relationship here, as it wouldn’t be appropriate, one day I might write about it on my other blog at some point, but I doubt it, so on to the book.

I was pleasantly surprised as I read this book with how easily accessible it was. I was concerned it was going to be too scientific and not personal enough for me, but I feel it struck an excellent balance between the two. In the last few chapters she goes in-depth into how and why she decided to write the book and one of the big decisions had to do with her personal experience and how it influenced her entire career and research focus and opportunities.

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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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Personal Project, Willpower

The Willpower Instinct Project – Week 7

McGonigal, Kelly - The Willpower InstinctNot sure this brings much to my project, but I needed to keep with the schedule and hold myself accountable.

This week I definitely noticed a change in my habits, but honestly I’ve hit enough road blocks I’m wondering why I’m still doing this. Thankfully, I’m a completionist and will follow through the project. This entire week focused solely on connecting our current self with our future self and finding out if we are undercutting that future self.

We were to reflect on if or how we discount future rewards, whether we’re waiting for a future self to take charge and inversely whether we’re too farsighted for our own good. I find that depending on what I’m looking at there are complete opposite answers. When it comes to money and savings, I’ve made a lot of changes recently where I’ve taken charge and am sorting things out. I do occasionally have to remind myself that it’s okay to have fun and not save every penny to pay things off, so I am too farsighted for my own good.

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