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490 reviews for:
Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain
Steven D. Levitt
3.7 AVERAGE
490 reviews for:
Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain
Steven D. Levitt
3.7 AVERAGE
The authors of Freakonomics decided they weren’t done providing advice to the general public. In their third book, Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner hoped to answer questions they received from readers in response to their previous books. Many were related to solving world issues, such as famine and epidemics, but some were existential: “What makes people truly happy?” Think Like a Freak was their attempt at answering some of these questions, and providing examples in the form of stories that advocate why it’s worth 'thinking like a freak'. The authors do not have a definition or formula of what it means to think in this way, but they do provide guidelines to help readers think 'like a freak'. Most of their advice is to stop over-thinking problems and not skip over the most obvious answer, as that can sometimes be the best solution. With chapter titles like “Think Like a Child” and “The Three Hardest Words in the English Language” (which are not 'I love you', by the way) the book is definitely thought provoking.
If you listen to the podcast, this will be highly redundant.
Nothing new. It was a book that barely skimmed the surface. I was disappointed. I was expecting something more.
Lots of material from previous books included. As the author points out, the expectation for them to solve ALL the problems now is pretty unreasonable. What will probably stick is the ability to say "I don't know," & asking the "obvious" questions.
Great intro look into the Freakanomics ways: how to think a bit differently than the rest of the world, how to approach problems a bit differently, and how to accept - or more importantly: embrace - obstacles and failure as a part of life.
Listeners of the Freakonomics podcast will find much of this book repetitive. It's certainly not as fresh as the previous two books, but it certainly is interesting enough for Freakonomics novices. The writing is engaging as always, although the structure does not exactly live upto the title's conceit. If this is a book teaching one to think like a freak, shouldn't it have been divided into chapters with clearly instructive content?
This third Freakonomics book keeps on entertaining with fun stories and instructions on how to "think like a freak" . I'll try, guys, but I really prefer the quirky, sideways analysis from your first two books
Why are the Freak books so refreshing? Maybe they tap into that part of us as humans that reminds us that we really don't have everything all figured out, that sometimes people and things act in unexpected ways. Maybe we like that. I don't know, but I do know that I loved reading this book.
I enjoyed this book. I admit I have not read their other books nor do I listen to podcasts. So I found this book provided a lot of great advice and tips and I’ll definitely will be changing the way I approach future problems.