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Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Extraordinary Results
Not yet published
Expected 10 Mar 26What if the only thing standing between you and the seemingly impossible…was belief?
Most of your limits aren’t physical. They’re psychological. In Beyond Belief, bestselling author Nir Eyal (Indistractable, Hooked) reveals how the hidden assumptions you carry shape what you see, how you feel, and what you do—and how to replace them with beliefs that unlock your true potential.
Grounded in neuroscience, psychology, and unforgettable case studies, Eyal introduces the Three Powers of Attention, Anticipation, and Agency. Mastering these powers transforms how you see challenges, feel about the future, and act when it matters most.
You’ll learn how
Spot hidden opportunities and solutions others overlook.Reclaim your mood, energy, and confidence by reshaping your beliefs.Stay calm, decisive, and in control when life feels uncertain.Break free from beliefs that sabotage your health, relationships, and career.Push further, last longer, and achieve beyond your limits.
If you’ve ever quit too soon, stalled in your career, or sabotaged your own goals, this book gives you the science and the system to go further than you thought possible.
Surgeries without anesthesia. Placebos that heal. Resilience multiplied 240 times longer. Beyond Belief reveals the science behind these breakthroughs and shows why your limits aren’t fixed—they’re learned. And with the right beliefs, you can achieve breakthrough results.
Most of your limits aren’t physical. They’re psychological. In Beyond Belief, bestselling author Nir Eyal (Indistractable, Hooked) reveals how the hidden assumptions you carry shape what you see, how you feel, and what you do—and how to replace them with beliefs that unlock your true potential.
Grounded in neuroscience, psychology, and unforgettable case studies, Eyal introduces the Three Powers of Attention, Anticipation, and Agency. Mastering these powers transforms how you see challenges, feel about the future, and act when it matters most.
You’ll learn how
Spot hidden opportunities and solutions others overlook.Reclaim your mood, energy, and confidence by reshaping your beliefs.Stay calm, decisive, and in control when life feels uncertain.Break free from beliefs that sabotage your health, relationships, and career.Push further, last longer, and achieve beyond your limits.
If you’ve ever quit too soon, stalled in your career, or sabotaged your own goals, this book gives you the science and the system to go further than you thought possible.
Surgeries without anesthesia. Placebos that heal. Resilience multiplied 240 times longer. Beyond Belief reveals the science behind these breakthroughs and shows why your limits aren’t fixed—they’re learned. And with the right beliefs, you can achieve breakthrough results.
Kindle Edition
Expected publication March 10, 2026
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2183 people want to read
About the author
Nir Eyal
11 books31.3k followersNir Eyal is the bestselling author of "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" (a finalist for the 2014 Goodreads Choice Awards) and "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life." (nominated for the 2019 Goodreads Choice Awards)
He has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. His writing on technology, psychology and business appears in the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, and Psychology Today.
Nir blogs regularly at NirAndFar.com
He has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. His writing on technology, psychology and business appears in the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, and Psychology Today.
Nir blogs regularly at NirAndFar.com
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Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Manifestation Is Having a Moment. “Beyond Belief” Has a Warning – Why Your Dreams Might Be Sabotaging Your Goals (and the Science-Backed Fix)
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 17th, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Beyond Belief” arrives with a title that sounds like a challenge and a dare. It is also, in its way, a public confession: Nir Eyal – best known for translating behavioral science into the clean levers of modern life – has spent years circling the most volatile lever of all, belief itself, and the ways it can either enlarge a person’s agency or quietly confiscate it.
Eyal’s central move is disarmingly practical. He refuses to treat belief as a private ornament (a set of metaphysical positions we hang in the mind like framed certificates) and instead treats it as a tool: something that directs what we notice, what we expect, and what we do next. He names these forces with the brisk clarity of a product designer: attention, anticipation, and agency. Through them, belief becomes less a matter of being “right” than a matter of becoming capable.
This is a book built the way Eyal builds arguments in his work: story first, then the study, then the distilled takeaway, then the invitation to practice. The anecdotes range from the intimate to the almost cinematic: a boy on a driveway in the predawn dark talking to God while his parents’ financial crisis rattles the house; an atheist movie-theater manager in Michigan donning a wizard robe to “hack the human brain” with honest placebo ritual; a young medical student, David Fajgenbaum, watching his body swell with fluid and his future shrink to a single, brutal statistic. Eyal uses these scenes the way a good essayist uses a doorway: not to distract from the thesis but to make it inhabitable.
“Beyond Belief” is at its best when it refuses to sneer. Eyal does not write as a debunker in love with the thrill of exposing other people’s irrationality. He writes as someone who has felt the seduction of certainty and the bleakness of pure skepticism, and who suspects that most of us are living somewhere between the two. That “somewhere” – the book’s emotional geography – is where Eyal locates what he calls the Third Power of Belief: the ability to act without complete metaphysical confidence. You don’t need to be certain to practice. You need a willingness to engage.
Chapter 9, “Prayer Works, With or Without Faith,” makes the case that ritual is less a supernatural transaction than a structured technology of the self. Here Eyal’s method is to gather both brain science and lived religion, then translate them into a language a free thinker can use without lying to themselves. He cites research on spirituality’s correlations with well-being and resilience, then recounts a cold-pressor experiment in which participants repeating spiritually meaningful phrases endure an ice-water pain test significantly longer than those using neutral relaxation techniques. The point is not “God proves Himself in the lab.” The point is that meaning – even when named as “the universe” or “higher self” rather than God – can unlock endurance.
Then Eyal goes further. He travels, as a kind of curious emissary, through Singapore’s dense neighborhood of coexisting faiths, asking spiritual leaders the question many rational adults carry like a private embarrassment: How do I pray if I’m not sure anyone is listening? The Orthodox rabbi offers permission to doubt and the primacy of practice (“We will do, and we will hear”). The imam emphasizes repetition and simplicity, prayer as a daily reset that “protects the heart.” A Hindu swami reframes God as consciousness and insists that the only thing worth praying for is truth. A Christian priest relocates the miracle into community – people showing up for one another, week after week. The Buddhist teacher, more overtly metaphysical, makes suffering into training, endurance into meaning. Out of these encounters Eyal distills what he calls universal patterns: action before understanding, submission to repetition, looking within, answering through community, transcending suffering.
If that list reads a little like a field guide – and it does – it’s because Eyal’s gift is taxonomy. He is the kind of writer who cannot resist turning the messy world into a set of legible principles, and in this book the impulse is both its strength and one of its risks. The strength is that it makes the ineffable usable. The risk is that it can make lived religion feel like a menu of psychological mechanisms. Eyal tries to soften that utilitarian edge with a concept he calls “constructive translation”: the idea that you can participate in religious language without adopting it literally, hearing “God’s love” as universal compassion, “divine will” as moral law, “guidance” as your highest self. It is a generous proposal, and it also raises the uncomfortable question that any serious reader will feel: At what point does translation become a private rewrite that dissolves the very thing the community is built around?
That tension is not a flaw so much as the book’s honest dilemma, and Eyal handles it better than most contemporary writers who want both the benefits of faith and the integrity of doubt. He admits that purely secular substitutes struggle with sustainability. He points to the rise and partial collapse of projects like atheist congregations and humanist societies, noting that communities persist not simply because of shared beliefs but because of binding obligations. In an era when loneliness has become a public-health headline and “community” is often an app feature rather than a practice, Eyal’s insistence that we require each other lands with force.
Where “Beyond Belief” becomes sharper – and more culturally pointed – is when it turns from prayer to the modern religion of positive thinking. Chapter 11, “Good Beliefs, Bad Beliefs,” is an extended critique of manifesting culture, “quantum” buzzwords, and the monetized promise that reality will reorganize itself if you vibrate correctly. Eyal doesn’t deny that expectations matter. He insists on the difference between expectation that prepares and fantasy that anesthetizes. He leans on the work of Gabriele Oettingen, whose research on mental contrasting shows that indulging in rosy daydreams can lower motivation by making the body behave as if success has already arrived. You feel the relief of “mission accomplished,” and then you do less.
It is hard not to think of the current economy of self-help content – the endless reels of “affirm it and it will come,” the courses that sell certainty as a subscription – while reading Eyal’s description of the Circle of False Promise: fantasy, brief lift, reduced motivation, disappointment, worsening mood, renewed need for escape. Anyone who has watched a friend get trapped in the bright spiral of “positive vibes only,” then collapse into self-blame when life fails to cooperate, will recognize the cruelty of the system Eyal describes: when the method fails, the industry says you were insufficiently aligned.
Eyal’s corrective is not cynicism but effort tethered to evidence. He offers a counter-magic: pair the desired future with the real obstacle, then design the next action. It is here that the book’s signature triad becomes most persuasive. Attention means refusing to filter out what is inconvenient to see. Anticipation means expecting difficulty and preparing for it rather than being offended by it. Agency means acting despite uncertainty – not because you are certain, but because waiting is its own belief, and often a costly one.
The case study that gives this argument its narrative voltage is the story of David Fajgenbaum, who is diagnosed with an ultra-rare immune disorder and discovers that the world’s leading experts, even at elite institutions, sometimes have nothing left to offer. Eyal frames Fajgenbaum’s early posture as the “Santa Claus theory”: the comforting belief that someone else has the answers and will deliver them. When a “miracle drug” fails and the best expert can only say “no one knows,” the belief collapses. Fajgenbaum, refusing resignation, becomes a researcher of his own body, cataloging data, noticing overlooked signals (those angry red moles), finding patterns no one else connected because no one was looking across specialties. He identifies a biological pathway and a decades-old drug on the shelf that might interrupt it, and he chooses to act.
This is a thrilling story, and it is also the moment where “Beyond Belief” has to walk a careful line. The book is smart enough to avoid implying that individual grit can solve systemic medical blind spots, or that every patient should become their own clinical trial. Eyal acknowledges the risks of incomplete evidence. Yet the moral of the narrative – that agency can change outcomes, and that belief can direct us toward better questions – is undeniable. In a time when the public’s relationship to expertise has become fraught, when “do your own research” can mean anything from thoughtful self-advocacy to algorithm-fed paranoia, Eyal’s version of the phrase is sober. It is patient-practitioner partnership, not anti-institutional rage.
If Chapter 11 takes aim at the glittering marketplace of manifesting, Chapter 10 turns to a subtler seduction: the way modern life turns every discomfort into a label, and every label into a fate. Eyal begins with a clinical parable – a trial participant who believes he has overdosed on an antidepressant placebo and collapses into real physiological crisis – and uses it to explain the nocebo effect, the dark twin of placebo. Then he widens the lens. Beliefs, he argues, are contagious. A television plotline can prime mass illness. Social media can spread symptom scripts faster than any virus.
This is where the book brushes up against combustible conversations of the last decade: self-diagnosis, the expansion of therapeutic language into everyday life, the debate over whether certain protective practices build safety or train fragility. Eyal approaches this terrain carefully. He does not mock therapy; he insists that diagnosis and medication can be essential. His concern is the story that calcifies around the label, the way “I am depressed” can quietly harden into “I am depression.” He is most convincing when he shows how small shifts in framing can alter a person’s willingness to act.
Eyal’s narrative engine keeps “Beyond Belief” from becoming a lecture. He returns to lived exemplars – a runner who starts with nine men outside a homeless shelter and builds a movement from routine; an endurance athlete on the Iditarod trail learning what it means to keep going; a hypnotist experimenting with pain; a “mountain man” chiseling a road through rock because grief becomes purpose. They arrive like bright pins on a map, reminders that agency is not a personality trait but a practice that can be trained.
That sobriety is one reason the book feels relevant beyond its self-help scaffolding. “Beyond Belief” is, among other things, an argument about epistemic humility: the ability to hold uncertainty without collapsing into passivity or fanaticism. That’s a civic skill as much as a personal one. You can feel the book speaking, indirectly, to the atmosphere of our moment: to the viral spread of health panics and misinformation, to the way labels become identities online, to the tendency of institutions to overcorrect with either condescension or caution. Chapter 10’s discussion of nocebo effects and diagnostic identity traps lands like a warning flare in a culture that has made self-description both a form of relief and a form of destiny.
And yet, for all its clear-eyed critique, “Beyond Belief” is not an austere book. It is warm, conversational, often funny in the quick way Eyal uses to keep a reader from feeling lectured. He loves a vivid prop: the enchanted name badge in the winter forest, the journal handed over by the imam, the shelves of worn religious commentary. He knows that a reader’s attention is earned, not demanded, and he writes with the pacing instincts of someone who has spent years thinking about what hooks people and what bores them.
There is, too, a certain moral brightness to his prose: he prefers verbs to abstractions, questions to proclamations, and he repeatedly offers the reader a handhold – a prompt, a practice, a way to test the claim in the lived world. The approach can feel a touch programmatic, but it also explains why his arguments linger. You can try them.
Still, there are moments when the book’s desire to be maximally helpful leads it toward over-structuring the very thing it wants to liberate. The repeated triads and “from limiting beliefs to liberating beliefs” tables offer satisfying closure, but they can also flatten the ambiguity that makes belief such a fierce human subject. The religious leaders in Singapore sometimes read less like full people and more like embodiments of principles, and the compression of their traditions into portable lessons will leave some readers grateful and others uneasy. Eyal’s intent is not appropriation, but the reader may still sense the modern managerial impulse at work: to turn mystery into method.
Yet perhaps that impulse is also the book’s honesty. “Beyond Belief” is written for a reader who lives in a world of dashboards – metrics at work, notifications at home, headlines in the pocket – and who is trying to recover something older than all of that: the capacity to commit, to endure, to belong, to change. If the book sometimes sounds like a manual for the soul, it’s because many of us have been taught to trust manuals more than we trust our own inward weather.
What lingers after the final pages is less a set of claims about God than a set of questions about what you are outsourcing. Where are you waiting for rescue? Where are you indulging in fantasies that feel like progress but leave you inert? Where are you using labels as maps, and where are you turning them into cages? Eyal’s best counsel is simple enough to irritate – and true enough to help: start with a small, repeatable ritual; pair hope with action; let evidence, not vibes, shape your confidence.
In the tradition of accessible behavioral-science writing like “The Power of Habit,” “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” “Mindset,” and “Atomic Habits,” Eyal offers a book that is easy to read and harder to dismiss. Its ambition is larger than those titles, though, because its subject is not only habit or cognition but the stories that make habit possible in the first place. “Beyond Belief” does not solve the mystery of belief. It does something more attainable and, for many readers, more urgent: it makes belief less of a verdict and more of a practice.
If the book occasionally overpromises neatness, it also consistently delivers something rarer in our age of either/or thinking: a way to live in the between. It also trusts the reader enough to leave certain questions unresolved, which is part of its charm. And that, measured on the scale that matters – whether a book enlarges the reader’s sense of possible action – makes “Beyond Belief” an unusually bracing piece of work, worthy of an 87 out of 100.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 17th, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Beyond Belief” arrives with a title that sounds like a challenge and a dare. It is also, in its way, a public confession: Nir Eyal – best known for translating behavioral science into the clean levers of modern life – has spent years circling the most volatile lever of all, belief itself, and the ways it can either enlarge a person’s agency or quietly confiscate it.
Eyal’s central move is disarmingly practical. He refuses to treat belief as a private ornament (a set of metaphysical positions we hang in the mind like framed certificates) and instead treats it as a tool: something that directs what we notice, what we expect, and what we do next. He names these forces with the brisk clarity of a product designer: attention, anticipation, and agency. Through them, belief becomes less a matter of being “right” than a matter of becoming capable.
This is a book built the way Eyal builds arguments in his work: story first, then the study, then the distilled takeaway, then the invitation to practice. The anecdotes range from the intimate to the almost cinematic: a boy on a driveway in the predawn dark talking to God while his parents’ financial crisis rattles the house; an atheist movie-theater manager in Michigan donning a wizard robe to “hack the human brain” with honest placebo ritual; a young medical student, David Fajgenbaum, watching his body swell with fluid and his future shrink to a single, brutal statistic. Eyal uses these scenes the way a good essayist uses a doorway: not to distract from the thesis but to make it inhabitable.
“Beyond Belief” is at its best when it refuses to sneer. Eyal does not write as a debunker in love with the thrill of exposing other people’s irrationality. He writes as someone who has felt the seduction of certainty and the bleakness of pure skepticism, and who suspects that most of us are living somewhere between the two. That “somewhere” – the book’s emotional geography – is where Eyal locates what he calls the Third Power of Belief: the ability to act without complete metaphysical confidence. You don’t need to be certain to practice. You need a willingness to engage.
Chapter 9, “Prayer Works, With or Without Faith,” makes the case that ritual is less a supernatural transaction than a structured technology of the self. Here Eyal’s method is to gather both brain science and lived religion, then translate them into a language a free thinker can use without lying to themselves. He cites research on spirituality’s correlations with well-being and resilience, then recounts a cold-pressor experiment in which participants repeating spiritually meaningful phrases endure an ice-water pain test significantly longer than those using neutral relaxation techniques. The point is not “God proves Himself in the lab.” The point is that meaning – even when named as “the universe” or “higher self” rather than God – can unlock endurance.
Then Eyal goes further. He travels, as a kind of curious emissary, through Singapore’s dense neighborhood of coexisting faiths, asking spiritual leaders the question many rational adults carry like a private embarrassment: How do I pray if I’m not sure anyone is listening? The Orthodox rabbi offers permission to doubt and the primacy of practice (“We will do, and we will hear”). The imam emphasizes repetition and simplicity, prayer as a daily reset that “protects the heart.” A Hindu swami reframes God as consciousness and insists that the only thing worth praying for is truth. A Christian priest relocates the miracle into community – people showing up for one another, week after week. The Buddhist teacher, more overtly metaphysical, makes suffering into training, endurance into meaning. Out of these encounters Eyal distills what he calls universal patterns: action before understanding, submission to repetition, looking within, answering through community, transcending suffering.
If that list reads a little like a field guide – and it does – it’s because Eyal’s gift is taxonomy. He is the kind of writer who cannot resist turning the messy world into a set of legible principles, and in this book the impulse is both its strength and one of its risks. The strength is that it makes the ineffable usable. The risk is that it can make lived religion feel like a menu of psychological mechanisms. Eyal tries to soften that utilitarian edge with a concept he calls “constructive translation”: the idea that you can participate in religious language without adopting it literally, hearing “God’s love” as universal compassion, “divine will” as moral law, “guidance” as your highest self. It is a generous proposal, and it also raises the uncomfortable question that any serious reader will feel: At what point does translation become a private rewrite that dissolves the very thing the community is built around?
That tension is not a flaw so much as the book’s honest dilemma, and Eyal handles it better than most contemporary writers who want both the benefits of faith and the integrity of doubt. He admits that purely secular substitutes struggle with sustainability. He points to the rise and partial collapse of projects like atheist congregations and humanist societies, noting that communities persist not simply because of shared beliefs but because of binding obligations. In an era when loneliness has become a public-health headline and “community” is often an app feature rather than a practice, Eyal’s insistence that we require each other lands with force.
Where “Beyond Belief” becomes sharper – and more culturally pointed – is when it turns from prayer to the modern religion of positive thinking. Chapter 11, “Good Beliefs, Bad Beliefs,” is an extended critique of manifesting culture, “quantum” buzzwords, and the monetized promise that reality will reorganize itself if you vibrate correctly. Eyal doesn’t deny that expectations matter. He insists on the difference between expectation that prepares and fantasy that anesthetizes. He leans on the work of Gabriele Oettingen, whose research on mental contrasting shows that indulging in rosy daydreams can lower motivation by making the body behave as if success has already arrived. You feel the relief of “mission accomplished,” and then you do less.
It is hard not to think of the current economy of self-help content – the endless reels of “affirm it and it will come,” the courses that sell certainty as a subscription – while reading Eyal’s description of the Circle of False Promise: fantasy, brief lift, reduced motivation, disappointment, worsening mood, renewed need for escape. Anyone who has watched a friend get trapped in the bright spiral of “positive vibes only,” then collapse into self-blame when life fails to cooperate, will recognize the cruelty of the system Eyal describes: when the method fails, the industry says you were insufficiently aligned.
Eyal’s corrective is not cynicism but effort tethered to evidence. He offers a counter-magic: pair the desired future with the real obstacle, then design the next action. It is here that the book’s signature triad becomes most persuasive. Attention means refusing to filter out what is inconvenient to see. Anticipation means expecting difficulty and preparing for it rather than being offended by it. Agency means acting despite uncertainty – not because you are certain, but because waiting is its own belief, and often a costly one.
The case study that gives this argument its narrative voltage is the story of David Fajgenbaum, who is diagnosed with an ultra-rare immune disorder and discovers that the world’s leading experts, even at elite institutions, sometimes have nothing left to offer. Eyal frames Fajgenbaum’s early posture as the “Santa Claus theory”: the comforting belief that someone else has the answers and will deliver them. When a “miracle drug” fails and the best expert can only say “no one knows,” the belief collapses. Fajgenbaum, refusing resignation, becomes a researcher of his own body, cataloging data, noticing overlooked signals (those angry red moles), finding patterns no one else connected because no one was looking across specialties. He identifies a biological pathway and a decades-old drug on the shelf that might interrupt it, and he chooses to act.
This is a thrilling story, and it is also the moment where “Beyond Belief” has to walk a careful line. The book is smart enough to avoid implying that individual grit can solve systemic medical blind spots, or that every patient should become their own clinical trial. Eyal acknowledges the risks of incomplete evidence. Yet the moral of the narrative – that agency can change outcomes, and that belief can direct us toward better questions – is undeniable. In a time when the public’s relationship to expertise has become fraught, when “do your own research” can mean anything from thoughtful self-advocacy to algorithm-fed paranoia, Eyal’s version of the phrase is sober. It is patient-practitioner partnership, not anti-institutional rage.
If Chapter 11 takes aim at the glittering marketplace of manifesting, Chapter 10 turns to a subtler seduction: the way modern life turns every discomfort into a label, and every label into a fate. Eyal begins with a clinical parable – a trial participant who believes he has overdosed on an antidepressant placebo and collapses into real physiological crisis – and uses it to explain the nocebo effect, the dark twin of placebo. Then he widens the lens. Beliefs, he argues, are contagious. A television plotline can prime mass illness. Social media can spread symptom scripts faster than any virus.
This is where the book brushes up against combustible conversations of the last decade: self-diagnosis, the expansion of therapeutic language into everyday life, the debate over whether certain protective practices build safety or train fragility. Eyal approaches this terrain carefully. He does not mock therapy; he insists that diagnosis and medication can be essential. His concern is the story that calcifies around the label, the way “I am depressed” can quietly harden into “I am depression.” He is most convincing when he shows how small shifts in framing can alter a person’s willingness to act.
Eyal’s narrative engine keeps “Beyond Belief” from becoming a lecture. He returns to lived exemplars – a runner who starts with nine men outside a homeless shelter and builds a movement from routine; an endurance athlete on the Iditarod trail learning what it means to keep going; a hypnotist experimenting with pain; a “mountain man” chiseling a road through rock because grief becomes purpose. They arrive like bright pins on a map, reminders that agency is not a personality trait but a practice that can be trained.
That sobriety is one reason the book feels relevant beyond its self-help scaffolding. “Beyond Belief” is, among other things, an argument about epistemic humility: the ability to hold uncertainty without collapsing into passivity or fanaticism. That’s a civic skill as much as a personal one. You can feel the book speaking, indirectly, to the atmosphere of our moment: to the viral spread of health panics and misinformation, to the way labels become identities online, to the tendency of institutions to overcorrect with either condescension or caution. Chapter 10’s discussion of nocebo effects and diagnostic identity traps lands like a warning flare in a culture that has made self-description both a form of relief and a form of destiny.
And yet, for all its clear-eyed critique, “Beyond Belief” is not an austere book. It is warm, conversational, often funny in the quick way Eyal uses to keep a reader from feeling lectured. He loves a vivid prop: the enchanted name badge in the winter forest, the journal handed over by the imam, the shelves of worn religious commentary. He knows that a reader’s attention is earned, not demanded, and he writes with the pacing instincts of someone who has spent years thinking about what hooks people and what bores them.
There is, too, a certain moral brightness to his prose: he prefers verbs to abstractions, questions to proclamations, and he repeatedly offers the reader a handhold – a prompt, a practice, a way to test the claim in the lived world. The approach can feel a touch programmatic, but it also explains why his arguments linger. You can try them.
Still, there are moments when the book’s desire to be maximally helpful leads it toward over-structuring the very thing it wants to liberate. The repeated triads and “from limiting beliefs to liberating beliefs” tables offer satisfying closure, but they can also flatten the ambiguity that makes belief such a fierce human subject. The religious leaders in Singapore sometimes read less like full people and more like embodiments of principles, and the compression of their traditions into portable lessons will leave some readers grateful and others uneasy. Eyal’s intent is not appropriation, but the reader may still sense the modern managerial impulse at work: to turn mystery into method.
Yet perhaps that impulse is also the book’s honesty. “Beyond Belief” is written for a reader who lives in a world of dashboards – metrics at work, notifications at home, headlines in the pocket – and who is trying to recover something older than all of that: the capacity to commit, to endure, to belong, to change. If the book sometimes sounds like a manual for the soul, it’s because many of us have been taught to trust manuals more than we trust our own inward weather.
What lingers after the final pages is less a set of claims about God than a set of questions about what you are outsourcing. Where are you waiting for rescue? Where are you indulging in fantasies that feel like progress but leave you inert? Where are you using labels as maps, and where are you turning them into cages? Eyal’s best counsel is simple enough to irritate – and true enough to help: start with a small, repeatable ritual; pair hope with action; let evidence, not vibes, shape your confidence.
In the tradition of accessible behavioral-science writing like “The Power of Habit,” “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” “Mindset,” and “Atomic Habits,” Eyal offers a book that is easy to read and harder to dismiss. Its ambition is larger than those titles, though, because its subject is not only habit or cognition but the stories that make habit possible in the first place. “Beyond Belief” does not solve the mystery of belief. It does something more attainable and, for many readers, more urgent: it makes belief less of a verdict and more of a practice.
If the book occasionally overpromises neatness, it also consistently delivers something rarer in our age of either/or thinking: a way to live in the between. It also trusts the reader enough to leave certain questions unresolved, which is part of its charm. And that, measured on the scale that matters – whether a book enlarges the reader’s sense of possible action – makes “Beyond Belief” an unusually bracing piece of work, worthy of an 87 out of 100.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I loved the first 2 parts and found the third part, just ok. The book is broken down into 3 parts...the Power to SEE, FEEL and DO what you believe.
In the first part, the Power to See, one line stood out, "Our beliefs shape what we see, which influences how we act, and this in turn affects how others respond, ultimately confirming our initial belief." The way we perceive things influence what we believe, and as the author says, "That's were belief lives: nestled between fact and faith."
The second part, The Power to FEEL, he highlights that what we believe about things shape how we feel, which then confirms those feelings and the cycle continues. He talks a lot about the idea of pain and discomfort and how those feelings affect what we believe about certain things. The most thought provoking idea in this section is "Sometimes our preconceptions cheat us out of fresh experiences. If you assume a meeting will be useless, you might mentally check out and indeed get nothing from it. The anticipation of uselessness becomes self-fulfilling." That is so true and has challenged me to think and approach things differently.
Finally in the last section, The Power to DO, I just breezed through it. It was more of the same for me, nothing really groundbreaking. Good reminders on other prevalent thoughts, but not many new ideas that caught my attention.
Summed up: "The Three Powers of Belief operate in a continuous loop: What you believe directs your focus (attention), which shapes your expectations (anticipation), which fuels your actions (agency)."
In the first part, the Power to See, one line stood out, "Our beliefs shape what we see, which influences how we act, and this in turn affects how others respond, ultimately confirming our initial belief." The way we perceive things influence what we believe, and as the author says, "That's were belief lives: nestled between fact and faith."
The second part, The Power to FEEL, he highlights that what we believe about things shape how we feel, which then confirms those feelings and the cycle continues. He talks a lot about the idea of pain and discomfort and how those feelings affect what we believe about certain things. The most thought provoking idea in this section is "Sometimes our preconceptions cheat us out of fresh experiences. If you assume a meeting will be useless, you might mentally check out and indeed get nothing from it. The anticipation of uselessness becomes self-fulfilling." That is so true and has challenged me to think and approach things differently.
Finally in the last section, The Power to DO, I just breezed through it. It was more of the same for me, nothing really groundbreaking. Good reminders on other prevalent thoughts, but not many new ideas that caught my attention.
Summed up: "The Three Powers of Belief operate in a continuous loop: What you believe directs your focus (attention), which shapes your expectations (anticipation), which fuels your actions (agency)."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews