59 Seconds

Listened to this book and now must go back and read it in order to take copious notes and apply! Great book although at times the case study after case study format did get a bit tiring.

While the book is quite interesting, compiling a lot of work on human behavior, psychology and sociology, it tends to dwell to much into details while you'd expect something more straightforward. But while the path is windy, the arrival is still interesting and you'll learn some interesting tricks about yourself and how to, indeed, improve some parts of your life. Just not tremendously.

There's a lot of research in this book, and the author generally gives you enough information about the studies for you to evaluate their process, which is nice. In addition to being backed up by one or more studies, the nuggets of advice are concrete and not always intuitive (for instance, people are much more likely to lie “to your face” than in an email because of the psychological weight of putting something in writing, and even judges and police officers are very bad at telling if someone is lying by their body language and physical appearance whereas vocabulary queues can be quite reliable [people who are not telling the truth tend to use far fewer first person pronouns but a lot more third person pronouns than normal], so email might actually be the best way to go next time you are looking to get to the bottom of something).

Some of the studies were new to me, others I've heard of at least a hundred times (like the infamous “marshmallow test”). Because a lot of the studies were conducted decades ago some of the advice feels old fashioned (the dating chapter in particular incorporates a lot of assumptions about heteronormative gender roles), but again at least the author provides enough information about the studies to let the reader see where that might be happening.