Master Your Mind: Counterintuitive Strategies to Refocus and Re-Energize Your Runaway Brain, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Master Your Mind: Counterintuitive Strategies to Refocus and Re-Energize Your Runaway Brain, by Roger Seip (Author), Robb Zbierski.

You’ll get there faster if you just slow down

Master Your Mind offers a bit of perspective and a lot of insight for anyone seeking long-term success. Success in business is spelled M-O-R-E: better results, faster growth, more revenue, greater efficiency. Do more. Make more. Achieve more. And do it now. Eventually, ambition turns to stress, then to frenzy, then to emptiness as once-ambitious workers endlessly trudge the hamster wheel chasing the next promotion. While top-level performance is the holy grail of business at all levels, there is another, much better way to achieve it: slow down. Yes, you read that right—S-L-O-W. This is your permission to jump off of the hamster wheel.

Slowing down is not a luxury, it is a necessity. A frenetic brain simply doesn’t perform at optimal levels. By maintaining a snail’s pace, you actually achieve better results—at rocket speed—because you’re firing on all cylinders. You’ll think of new things, approach old problems from new perspectives, and breathe a breath of fresh air into everything you do. This book shows you how to achieve this state of steady, sustainable fire, and how to get further by crawling than you ever did while attempting to fly.

We are in a challenging time, especially if we have our devices on (is ‘off’ even a normal state anymore?) and even more so if our notifications on too. Unless you consciously think about how to keep your train of thought it can be a real challenge sometimes to even remember what it was you were in the middle of doing. We’re not sure what your strategies are for dealing with this, but we do know that it can be difficult to stay focused. One of the challenges is to even be aware of this new state of constant distraction, so pervasive it has become.

We have reviewed a lot of books on mindfulness recently. This one managed to be smart, wise and yet not over academic and a pleasure to read. Both of the authors demonstrate their knowledge, at the same time as recognising the challenge of achieving mindfulness. At the same time though they do a good job of articulating the benefits of achieving this state of awareness. The reference to counter-intuitive strategies is illustrated by their discussion of going slower to achieve more. It does make sense too. We, as humans, are awful at multitasking, far better to focus on getting one job done, at least reasonably well, before moving onto the next one. They explain why this is a smarter strategy than believing that we can be all things to all people. Saying no is a super powerful skill, to be used far more than we realise.  Our subconscious and default settings are both explored, with good ideas, and inspiration to help us to get out of doing things a certain way just because that is the way they have always been done.

If you truly value not being constantly distracted and getting more done this is a book worth reading.

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