Make Your Brain Work: Perform at a Higher Level

It's a good overview of the many (quite well-known, I think) studies. I'd wish for a bit more nuance — for example, neither the marshmallow test nor Matthew Walker's work get their debunking mentioned — but given how some other books spend 200 pages chewing on one study and this one covers way more and lists its references, it's kinda okay. Some attempts are made at reconciling and connecting the results of these various studies (e.g. eventually the author addresses the fact that on page 84 we're told that making decisions depletes your willpower while on p.104 we read that greater improvements in accuracy and sustained learning are achieved if you don't think that willpower is finite and depletes with use but rather that exerting it can be invigorating), but they often don't go further than rhetorical questions directed into the future. I wish the book spent more time digging into it for real.

And now I'm going to complain about the writing. There's the tired-to-death moldy approach of explaining the ideas through the made-up stories and cringey dialogues of an imaginary consultant and his three imaginary clients, which I was mostly able to shrug off because it didn't dominate the entire text. But then there are also the endless bulletpoint lists of touting the same horn and cliches repeated so often you're starting to wonder about the use of LLMs in this book. Already in the beginning I was stumbling upon “here's the kicker”, “the results?”, and words like “anyway” repeated in the adjacent sentences. But in the last chapter it all exploded with dozens (I'm not kidding) of sentences following the exact same structure:

Great leaders don't just speak — they communicate with clarity, consistency and conviction. Great communicators don't just provide information — they shape understanding and inspire action. Great leaders don't just see things from their own viewpoint — they step into the minds of others.

Platitudes and repetitions killed this book for me.