Ask HN: What book changed your life in 2019?

Spiegel is a psychologist. If you are not a rider then you might not know that one of the main appeals of riding, that many riders have not explicitly identified, is the tight integration of mind/body or the subconscious and conscious mind. This was why I bought the book.

Your riding skills have to be automatized subconsciously because the conscious mind is far too slow in this environment. In his book he has a number of riding "objectives" that you need to automatize to be an expert or world class rider. These are pretty standard riding tips and strategies but the part that changed my life was his recommendation of using an error counter. You get one of those hand-held tally-counters, like coaches use to count laps or reps, and you mount it on your bike and when you violate the rules or tips you count an error and forget about it. At the end of your ride or practice race you count and track your error rate and think about ways in which you could have done better.

Now I am just a recreational motorcycle rider and have no desire to become a world-class rider so I never used his method to improve my riding skills. Nevertheless, I realized that everything he says about riding applies to acting and living in your daily life! Daily life moves too fast to think/act consciously and most of our actions are guided by subconscious processing that we automatized in the past. The problem comes when you consciously want to change your behavior but keep subconsciously acting on old ideas, premises and habit.

So how do you undo that automatic error? I bought a couple of tally counters and carry one with me, one in my car etc and count errors in my automatic thoughts or actions for the week and calculate and track a daily error rate. In a few weeks I have been able to make progress on correcting subconscious errors that I have been trying to correct for decades with little to no progress. I am using it to count negative thoughts, mind-reading (of others), logical errors and other subconscious flaws that I want to fix or improve. This tip has changed my life and you probably don't even need to read the book to get this precious gem.

A beautiful book about waves, love, writing, and living a good life. As a surfer, skier, mountain biker, and overall risk taker, this book affected me in the same way "Walden Pond" or "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" affects some people. It is the most impactful book I've read in the past 10 years. Probably not for everyone, but for those of a certain ilk it is stunning.