The Skinny on Willpower

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This review was written by The Lost Goat, you can find out more about her at thelostgoat.blogspot.com.

The Skinny on Willpower is not explicitly a personal finance book. Rather, it tries to give a concrete, step-by-step plan to transform any desire for change into day-to-day action. Jim Randel wants to teach you how to take, for instance, the gazelle-like intensity that Dave Ramsey talks about, and turn it into an action plan on which you can follow through.

A quick read

The book advertises itself as “a super quick read,” and it does not disappoint. The back cover promises to take less than an hour of your time; I clocked my own reading time at a few seconds less than twenty minutes.

In great part this is due to the book’s format – it is organized as a dialogue between stick-figure cartoon characters, so most pages contain only a few lines of text. It’s an interesting idea, but it is poorly executed. The concepts in the dialogue are almost insultingly simplified. The protagonists themselves are Billy, who needs to lose weight, and Beth, who wants to start a business. Neither of their stories models a stereotypical personal finance story closely enough to be interesting on that account and both stories are incredibly boring on their own merits.

Additionally, one of the stick figure characters in the book is a fictionalized version of the book’s author, and his relentless self-promotion was over the top, even for the self help genre, where some amount of self-promotion is routine. Within the text, the book promotes the author’s website several times and also his next book about credit cards as part of the advice given the characters. A visit to the author’s website shows that one can purchase books, sign up for weekly emails, or read the author’s blog, but gave no further useful information, even though the text suggested its use as supplemental material. The final page of the book shows the author, shirtless, presumably to demonstrate that he has mastered the “skinny” enumerated in the title.

Finally, this book is not directed specifically at Christians. The author’s solutions are entirely human-directed; there is no suggestion that the reader call on the divine for aid at any point in the text.

A worthwhile read

Despite this, I found this book worthwhile because of the author’s obvious, genuine enthusiasm for his subject material. Behind the silly cartoon characters and the relentless self-promotion, he has given some serious thought to the process of goal achievement, and the results are well worth the reader’s time. I am therefore ignoring his cartoon stories for the rest of the review, and focusing on the few pages of substantive text.

None of the ideas presented are new in and of themselves, but the author organizes them in a way that is both novel and compelling. His system emphasizes that, no matter how grand the scope of the goal, achievement is a matter of day-to-day implementation. He gives multiple and varied suggestions to set yourself up to achieve your goal in day-sized increments. For instance, he suggests visualizing how you plan to achieve your goals, and looking for possible challenges. Once you have identified challenges, you pre-determine responses to them that will keep you on track to your goal. Finally, you determine how you will get yourself back on the wagon should you fall off the path to your goal, with an emphasis that incremental failure is not a measure of the chance of absolute success.

Another idea I found particularly compelling was his idea of “taking your own temperature.” He advises his readers not to set themselves up for failure, but to make sure that they are truly and passionately committed to the difficult enterprise they have chosen. So often, the self-help genre assumes this commitment in its readers, and I found his logic compelling. Looking at the goals I have both achieved and fallen short on, long term (rather than spur-of-the-moment) passion was a determining factor.

The author’s passion for his subject matter was contagious; I took away a renewed energy for tackling some difficult personal goals that I had previously set aside. If you find yourself in a trough, faltering in your own gazelle-like intensity, you could do worse than pick up this book for a shot of inspiration.