Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain

“Think Like a Freak” is a thought provoking and at times unorthodox look at how it is possible to retrain the human brain to make impactful decisions. I thoroughly enjoyed the format of the book. The authors present big picture ideas and questions followed with illustrations of real-world antidotes. The stories appear so delightfully random and varied. It is fascinating to have a book that weaves together colonialism, birth rates, famine, crime rates, Bon Jovi, intestinal microbes, a hot dog eating contest, and Winston Churchill. They weave together modern-day urban legends and historical stories to highlight a unique perspective of the choices we make. It creates a fascinating and captivating story of economics and social decisions. How does human nature determine our decisions? Are we capable of making intelligent independent decisions or are we predestined to repeat the same mistakes? I love a book that comes full circle and Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner take seemingly random stories and connect them back to their message. This book features an at times unconventional approach to problem solving and is a fast read. The book tackles some fairly weighty issues in a lighthearted manner. They also take our preconceived notions and turn them completely upside down. I saw applications for their approach to tackling problems in business situations, educational environments, and personal life choices. A lot of the book was applicable to instructional design. How powerful would it be to be aware of how people make decisions and learn before designing a course. What if business entrepreneurs thought about not just their product and profit at a surface level but about how to create something truly impactful and successful in the long term? One of my biggest takeaways from this book was to find something that you love to do and obsess about it. So simple but so powerful. It is obvious from reading this book that Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner love what they do.

Like Freakanomics, this is a great read. I think the chapters vary in quality and originality, but even though I read the chapters in order, I think that you wouldn't lose much by skipping around. For me the most interesting chapter was the fourth one which covered the differences in the success and work habits of Catholics and Protestants and Catholic and Protestant countries. The chapter that I found the most puzzling was the eighth one on persuading people to believe in/care about man made global warming. To me, the reason that many can't be persuaded of the immanent threat of global warming is that those who are saying that the threat is immanent aren't acting like it in their personal behavior. Barack "the science is settled" Obama flew Michelle on Air Force One to New York City for a "date night" early in his presidency. He takes multiple vacations on Air Force One while she arrives at the same destination hours later on her own plane. Al Gore flies around on private jets, lives in enormous houses and sold his Current TV station to the oil enriched Al Jazeera. Robert Kennedy Jr won't allow wind turbines near his property. It's as if your next door neighbor told you that you live in a dangerous, high crime area and that you must install iron bars on your windows and stay inside with the doors and windows locked. Meanwhile he sunbathing in his front yard with the doors and windows wide open and his children playing in the street (later you find out that he owns a company that sells iron bars/carbon credits).

This is the first time I have read a book by the authors, but I plan to read their previous books. This is such an easy, yet thought-provoking read. As someone who regularly solves problems and looks for ways to improve processes, I am excited to apply some of the lessons learned from this book. What makes this book so good is that it is full of great stories that introduce and back up valuable lessons that have the power to change your thinking. This book challenges how we currently think while giving some practical ways to think differently. It has been said that our lives move in the direction of our strongest thoughts, so to apply new thinking concepts from experts should positively affect our thinking and therefore our lives. A large portion of the book is devoted to problem-solving. It shares concepts such as thinking like a child, redefining a problem, and attacking the root cause all woven through some nicely shared stories. The stories are valuable to helping the concepts stick in the brain. Stories deeply resonant with people and are memorable. In fact, after reading this book, I aspire to be a better storyteller as there is so much value in it as a skillset to possess. The chapter about quitting revealed a big upside to quitting things that take up time, space, energy, and the likes without benefit. Or perhaps, it is time to quit one thing to be able to move on from something that is not working: a job, a relationship, a career, etc. Quitting seems like it would only apply to losers, but after reading the chapter, I understand that sometimes we continue to do things for the sake of commitment only. That reason alone needs to be weighed as sometimes one must let go to move into something more worthwhile, to the next season, or calling. The authors do not suggest quitting everything and doing nothing, but rather, to see that quitting does not equate to failure as many have been taught. I would recommend this read, especially if you solve problems a lot. Again, it is quick, easy, and interesting. This book will challenge your status quo of thinking and give you some new concepts as replacements.

This rendition of the Freaks was an enjoyable quick read. But the standards they set with Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics are very high and this doesn't really come close. There are some clever and valuable observations and certainly an interesting way at looking at thins differently. However, the narrative is not very smooth. They seem to jump a bit helter skelter...especially in a chapter that begins with education generalizations only to end with an extremely long winded explanation of hot dog eating techniques. This was by far my least favorite chapter. If you are like me and subscribe to podcasts from the Freakonomics guys...then you will find the stories very familiar. I found myself knowing the full arc of most every argument posed before the first paragraph was complete. A short and quick read that may be a sentimental purchase to have the third book from the fellas...but not a home run that will try. You into the freak kind of thinker they claim to be fostering through your read!

This book was interesting, and thought-provoking, like the author's other books. It has a different focus, in that this book talks about the "economic" ways of thinking about problems and their answers that have lead to the articles and conclusions reported in the author's previous books. I think it would be of interest to anyone who likes psychology, and to think about why our world is the way it is, and how we might be able to change it. Note that it is not a very long book, with about 30% of the total book being references and notes.

I read the first Freakonomics and loved it. Somehow missed the second one, but WOW! Was this one great. Levitt and Dubner, a prominent economist and journalist respectively, are dedicated to the notion that decisions and actions should be based on fact, not supposition, strongly held belief, or political theology. In previous books, they have demonstrated their approach to solving world problems. In this one, they attempt to teach readers how to do it themselves. Yes! Transform those strongly held but false beliefs into fact-based operating principles. What an amazing and refreshing concept! Especially after watching the political debates. I found the authors' insistence on nibbling at the edges of world problems and tackling doable tasks rather than pitching limited resources at conundrums that CAN'T be solved by mortals very refreshing. I also found Levitt and Dubner's just saying out loud that quitting is OK. Not only that, it's the right thing to do for many reasons, not the least avoiding dumping vast resources into solutions that won't work. I read someone saying in a review of this book that it was sociology, not economics. Maybe, but I doubt ten readers could understand it if if was a "pure economics" tome. My first career was in economics. I've got a couple of degrees in the field and was the economic analyst for Santa Clara County (where San Jose CA is) back in the day. When I was working on my PhD many years ago, I could see that the mathematical branches of economics were becoming the high-status subsets of the profession. Yet they described reality less accurately than the kind that used words. I quit that PhD program when I realized what was happening in the field made no sense. That's when I found out quitting can be a good thing. During this period, I chatted with a fellow whose PhD was in econometrics from one of the Ivies––he was a member of the anointed few. He told me that the best econometrics could do was predict the direction of an economic change, up, down or stays the same, not the amount. So, had Levitt dragged out the math, probably no one would know what he was talking about and it wouldn't yield any more accurate facts than the chatty approach. Freakonomics and Think like a Freak are blessed by Dubner, who can write the conclusions up in terms we can all understand. Stories are the best way of teaching/explaining. I don't know that the authors succeed in their task of giving people the tools to think/act based on fact, but the attempt sure is fun and interesting.

Many people call me smart, but I think it’s more that years of listening to the Freakonomics podcast has taught me to Think Like a Freak. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (the Freakonomics duo) have added a new collaboration to their book list, this time teaching the thought processes or strategies behind their research studies. If you love their research stories, there are plenty of those too. For a bit of background, the Freakonomics duo members are each an economist and a journalist. Both with impressive careers before Dubner bullied Levitt into the collaboration. It started with a book. Then another book and a documentary, and lecture series, and a podcast series, and now this third book. As I mentioned, Think Like a Freak takes a slightly different tack than previously. They were criticized for it in GoodReads reviews, but I like it. Then again, I always get frustrated when people don’t Think Like a Freak. So, grrr, read this book. As with the previous books, this one includes enticing storytelling that explains the economics behind everyday things. In this one, I particularly loved the stories of the magician and thinking with the naivety of children. I’m also never going to be able to look at a hotdog the same again. You can tell that Dubner wrote the narrative. I heard his voice reading it. Who is Think Like a Freak for? Everyone. Seriously, the world would be a much better place if more people would think like a freak. If you’re a regular listener of the show, and especially around May last year when this was released, the stories will sound familiar. Many were covered in the podcast, some with more detail (the magicians in chapter two) and others in less. You’ll still get value from the freak-thinking tutorials in chapters eight and nine at the end. First published on http://tapdancingspiders.com/book-reviews/book-review-think-like-freak/

As a huge fan of the podcast, I read this entire book with Dubner's voice in my head. That was awesome. The downside of the book for someone who's been following along with Freakonomics Radio over the past few years is that there's very little "new" here. A quick perusal through the citations section reveals a lot of references to the podcast, and to research that's been featured in the podcast. So if you're looking for brand new stories, this is perhaps not the book in which you'll find them. That said, I think the book succeeds in providing a more comprehensive synthesis of various things the podcast and the other books have addressed. As other reviewers (and the book itself) point out, the approach is more prescriptive and practical. In that respect, I found the book valuable in describing an approach to thinking as opposed to delving into a clever new case study. My reading experience was essentially the book saying, "Here's a core approach to critical thinking/problem solving, and here's how the stories we've examined before illustrate the value of that approach." So while not many of the stories were new, they were presented in a unique way which illustrated things from a different angle than I'd experienced them when listening on the podcast. It did not take me very long to read - I basically knocked it out over the course of one day. I'd recommend the book to people unfamiliar to the podcast, people who want to support Dubner/Levitt/Freakonomics, and to people who just like to spend time with some of the stories they've heard before.