The Achievement Habit

Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life

By: Bernard Roth

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

The co-founder of the Stanford d.School introduces the power of design thinking to help you achieve goals you never thought possible.

Achievement can be learned. It’s a muscle, and once you learn how to flex it, you’ll be able to meet life’s challenges and fulfill your goals, Bernard Roth, Academic Director at the Stanford d.school contends.

In The Achievement Habit, Roth applies the remarkable insights that stem from design thinking—previously used to solve large scale projects—to help us realize the power for positive change we all have within us. Roth leads us through a series of discussions, stories, recommendations, and exercises designed to help us create a different experience in our lives. He shares invaluable insights we can use to gain confidence to do what we’ve always wanted and overcome obstacles that hamper us from reaching our potential, including:

• Don’t try—DO;
• Excuses are self-defeating;
• Believe you are a doer and achiever and you’ll become one;
• Build resiliency by reinforcing what you do rather than what you accomplish;
• Learn to ignore distractions that prevent you from achieving your goals;
• Become open to learning from your own experience and from those around you;
• And more.

The brain is complex and is always working with our egos to sabotage our best intentions. But we can be mindful; we can create habits that make our lives better. Thoughtful and powerful The Achievement Habit shows you how.

Engaging and enjoyable

This book was not what I expected, but I still found it engaging and enjoyable, due in no small part to the narrator, whose conversational tone is a great match for the author's writing style and perfectly conveys the wry humor in the text. The narrator's performance is flat-out terrific.

Having read and/or listened to some other books with "Habit" in the title, I was expecting a nuts-and-bolts sort of book, and this is anything but (I can see how this might frustrate those who are looking for nuts and bolts). Instead, this book is the distilled experience of a man who has lived a long life, seen much, done a lot, and thought deeply about it. The author is 87 as I write this, and got his PhD before I was born--and I'm in my early fifties.

The book splits its attention between the philosophical and the psychological, and has a great many anecdotes, which are sometimes circuitous ways of either illustrating or leading up to a point. If you are interested in the ways that subtleties of language can affect your thinking, how the arrangement of chairs in a room affects the interaction of a group, how movement affects creativity, and how to think differently about teaching something to others, you will find something to take away from this book.

a must read

loved it. lots of useful tidbits and principles for life and work... bernie is super.

Basic self promotion

Overall this book sounds mostly like a self promotion of the author and his projects, something written to look good on his resume. Pretty basic motivational information, I really had no takeaways from it. At least it was not too boring.

Very Actionable

I've read/listened to a lot of "self help" books, podcasts, audiobook etc. This would be in my top 5. it's full of actionable advice, doesn't repeat itself, and isn't full of barely related anecdotes. The narrator is great as well.

fantastic book!

this book served as a reminder of many things and has empowered me to make different choices and to think about how I interviewed with the world. Great parallel to design thinking!