Editor’s Rating: 6.4

Editor’s Note: This review is a third entry in a series of weekly e-book reviews.  The review is a guest post by Thursday Bram of ThursdayBram.com.

The premise of Scott Young’s How to Change a Habit is the plain old fact that everybody wants to change their habits. Much of the blogosphere seems predicated on this fact, from Leo Babauta’s efforts on Zen Habits to J.D. Roth’s bettering of his personal finances through good money habits on Get Rich Slowly.

The key message in Young’s e-book is that the ability to change one’s habits is a simple skill that can be developed.

My initial reaction was a little snide, an off-hand comment that if changing habits was so simple, why do so many people fail to quit smoking? I struggled with Young’s portrayal of habit-changing as something so basic as putting on clean socks. While he attempted to make it clear that such a skill is something to be developed rather than an overnight talent, his personal examples seemed to scream “This is so easy that a baby can do it! No effort! No pain!” I’m sure that this message was not Young’s intention, but it made the rest of the book hard for me to swallow.

How to Change a Habit is not without value, despite the undertones. Young provides very useful tips on how to keep on track through what he calls a trial period: 30 days in which a person spends practicing a new habit. That 30 day chunk of time is pretty common among life coaches and other proponents of change: personal development guru Steve Pavlina was writing about 30 day trials of new habits in 2005.  Young, however, makes the process of the trial period much clearer, providing numerous tips on how to keep on track throughout a trial period. He focuses on concrete suggestions, explains how they work and provides examples.

Young seems to have made a habit out of changing his habits. He has a full scale ritual to not only start the process of ingraining a new pattern in his life but a set path he follows during his trial period. I’d argue that this meta-habit makes it easier for Young to change his habits than any of us just starting out, but it is important to note that his trail breaking does provide others with a good starting point. Young’s ability to show where in his habit-changing process he usually runs into problems is invaluable for anyone assuming that changing a habit really is so easy.

An additional benefit comes from Young’s division between beginner level techniques and those used by pro-level habit changers. The typical person working on changing a basic habit, for instance, wouldn’t benefit much from Young’s explanation of Replacement Theory. However, given it’s placement with other higher level tips, a beginner could skip it until she is ready to advance to that level.

Overall, How to Change a Habit is a good how-to guide, despite an authorial tone I am less than fond of. The material is helpful and logical, outlining a reasonable plan for changing habits. I am especially impressed with Young’s habit of creating a paper trail for his efforts, making it easier to show that progress is being made.

[tags]changing habits, habits, Scott Young, How to Change a Habit, e-book, e-book reviews, Thursday Bram, Scott H Young, Steve Pavlina, Leo Babauta, Zen Habits[/tags]