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[the Power of Thinking Without Thinking]
Dec 03, 2015firebreather rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
I like Malcolm Gladwell's work in general but I had a hard time getting to the end of this book. I thought the material was kind of interesting, but did not warrant over 8 hours of audio. A lot of the anecdotes got into excruciating but irrelevant detail (e.g. the ages of the 4 cops in New York, who was sitting where in the car), and the narrative wasn't compelling enough for me. The other annoying part of this book was also the very preachy and presumptive tone. There was a lot of assertions like "this is what you would do" where I'm reading and thinking, "No, I wouldn't do that". As far as the core message of this books goes: The basic premise is that we all have the ability to make instantaneous, good, instinctive judgments. I have been a big intrinsic believer about being able to train your gut or your instincts to take good decisions, and a lot of more recent books (e.g Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath) seem to back up that concept. However in this book I didn't see any mentions of training your gut - a lot of it seemed to just be taken for granted. Also, the contexts where it works vs. fails and not explained well. Like any book review, these views are my own and any reader is clearly welcome to disagree as well as form their own.