Evidence audits
Self-help books, audited
The best ideas from popular self-help books — read with open eyes. We keep each book's structure and check every claim underneath against the original studies: which parts hold up, which are overstated, and what to actually do about it. No invented numbers, no borrowed hype.
Read Your Mind
Oz Pearlman (2025) — every claim checked
Partly solid. Seven of the book's 12 chapters rest on well-replicated psychology — memory training, asking for help, focusing on others, storytelling. The other five mix…
7 of 12 chapters hold up strongly
Read the audit →Think Again
Adam Grant (2021) — every claim checked
Mostly holds up — Grant is unusually careful for the genre. Six of 11 chapters rest on solid research, including the negotiation and listening chapters, which are the one…
6 of 11 chapters hold up strongly
Read the audit →Atomic Habits
James Clear (2018) — every claim checked
The core mechanism — cue, context, friction, repetition — is among the best-supported ideas in all of self-help: 11 of 20 chapters hold up strongly. The famous numbers ar…
11 of 20 chapters hold up strongly
Read the audit →Deep Work
Cal Newport (2016) — every claim checked
The advice is sound; the scientific case under it is weaker than the book's confident tone. What holds: switching tasks leaves "attention residue" that measurably degrade…
3 of 7 chapters hold up strongly
Read the audit →Grit
Angela Duckworth (2016) — every claim checked
Grit is real, and Duckworth is a serious researcher who has been honest about her work's limits. But the central promise doesn't survive: across 66,807 people, grit predi…
3 of 13 chapters hold up strongly
Read the audit →Mindset
Carol Dweck (2006) — every claim checked
Growth mindset is the most famous idea in modern self-help, and one of the most shrunken: across 273 studies of 365,000+ people, mindset explains about 1% of the differen…
1 of 8 chapters hold up strongly
Read the audit →Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman (2011) — every claim checked
The Nobel Prize-winning core — anchoring, framing, the planning fallacy, prospect theory — survived the replication crisis and is still the best guide to how judgment goe…
3 of 5 chapters hold up strongly
Read the audit →Put the good ideas to work — start with your CV
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