Mind Hacking: How to Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days

by John Hargrave

Have you ever wished you could reprogram your brain, just as a hacker would a computer? In this 3-step guide to improving your mental habits, learn to take charge of your mind and banish negative thoughts, habits, and anxiety—in just twenty-one days!A seasoned author, comedian, and entrepreneur, Sir John Hargrave once suffered from unhealthy addictions, anxiety, and poor mental health. After cracking the code to unlocking his mind’s full and balanced potential, his entire life changed for the better. In Mind Hacking, Hargrave reveals the formula that allowed him to overcome negativity and eliminate mental problems at their core. Through a 21-day, 3-step training program, this book lays out a simple yet comprehensive approach to help you rewire your brain and achieve healthier thought patterns for a better quality of life. It hinges on the repetitive steps of analyzing, imagining, and reprogramming to help break down barriers preventing you from reaching your highest potential. By treating your brain as a computer and mastering Hargrave’s mind hacking formula, you, too, can create a positive, permanent shift in your thinking, leading to personal and professional triumphs in all areas of life.

Genres: Self Help, Nonfiction, Psychology, Personal Development, Audiobook, Productivity, Science

241 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2015

Reviews

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take-outs:
- Invisible advisors
- Illuminati
- Third nipple (cheezy)
- Mental clean up
- Golden breathing technique
- Superuser of my mind
- Mind film
- Metathinking
- Stand up to smile
- Jazz
- 5Why
- Worst case
- Best future
- LASER = Limited-Achievable-Specific-Evaluated-Repeatable
- Smiling in my soul
- 'My theoretical physics department'

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this when the author put it out there for free for anyone willing to give him feedback. I thought at the time what a good idea it was to have people take your self-help book on a test drive before it's published. A little over a year later, and I'm still putting his ideas to use. There were some that made more of an impression than others, but I can definitely say that the book has had a lasting positive affect on me.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Mind Hacking" is a way to re-write problem thoughts and succeed at the goals you set. There are three main steps: being aware of what you're thinking, choosing new thoughts to replace the problem thoughts, and actually replacing those thoughts. For each step, we're given simple exercises that help you achieve things like increasing your concentration. The last step also covers coming up with small, do-able steps toward your ultimate goal. These techniques are good for any goal, not just re-writing problem thoughts.

Each concept is illustrated with a number of stories and analogies. While the author sometimes refers to scientific studies, he explains the concepts in computer programming terms and in other ways so that even teens can easily understand them. In fact, I know of a teen who could really use the information in this book. I suspect the humorous, encouraging writing style will keep her engaged in the content.

I've previously read about some of these ideas and tried them, and they really do work. This book brings these ideas together and explains them on a level that most people can understand and do. I'd recommend this book to anyone ready to change their negative thoughts that keep coming back or who need advice on how to achieve their goals.

I received an ebook review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This needs to get more popular, because it is the first time I have ever actually liked a self help book. This guy has got it figured out, and more people need to get on board.

Basically, Hargrave's idea is to break your issues down into tiny manageable bits. Which isn't all that original, true--I've heard that method explained many times before. What makes this so successful for me is that he used nerdy references that made sense to me, and gave multiple different variations of the steps. So if one didn't work for me, another one would. And the same way we have to take one step at a time to walk the length of a football field needs to be applied to our thinking. Don't think about how giving up ice cream means you'll never get to cool down with it ever again. Just think about extending your arm to the trash bin and dropping what's in your hand.

That is a brief example, but you get the point. Hargrave does a brilliant job of making everything seem manageable. Even the things that I normally scoff at didn't seem so silly when he wrote about it. Like meditating. I never thought I could be the one to actually sit quietly with nothing but my thoughts. But Hargrave's take on it is so easy and applicable to everyday life that it didn't seem like a stretch.

Another big one that hit hard was the negative thought loops. Everyone's got them, whether we recognize it or not. It really is just a question of mentally forcing ourselves out of that rut after identifying it.

I benefited from reading this, even though I didn't do the homework portion. I actually think this is a very positive book to have around and I think I'll pass it on to a friend who could use it.

[Matthew Pineda · Rating 3 out of 5]

The methods of mental organization themselves were very good, but the author very heavily pushed his own very quirky names for them. The book as a whole appeals to geeks and technology enthusiasts which is very understandable, since the book is called mind hacking. But the constant deep sidetracking into the stories of Silicon Valley icons, then to loosely tie them into the chapters narrative tired me after a while. Good methods and very respectable life story and progression, but the presentation of the methods came off as very tacky to me.

[Kevin Orth · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are turned off by esoteric jargon and consider yourself a techno-geek, this book is for you. the author takes a number of well established 'power of positive thinking' techniques and frames them in programmer-friendly language. He has an easy, entertaining manner that makes it an engaging, fun read as well. Highly recommend.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

When John Hargrave told me he had a book coming out called Mind Hacking, and that it was available online for free, I wasn't really sure what to expect. I thought it would be some tricks and exercises for improving your memory and increasing your powers of concentration. And it's sort of that. But it's so much more.

As someone who's pretty familiar with the works of spiritual thought leaders such as Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay, Mike Dooley, and Jack Canfield, I recognized a lot of the concepts in this book. But where those authors might use warm & fuzzy or new-agey terminology like "meditation," "visualization," and "manifestation," Hargrave reframes everything in order to appeal to a different audience: computer geeks. Instead of meditation, he talks about concentration games. Instead of affirmations or visualization, he talks about programming loops. Instead of quoting Deepak Chopra or Eckhart Tolle, he quotes Steve Jobs and Star Trek. To illustrate his concepts, he uses entertaining and often humorous stories of computer science pioneers. If you think this sounds boring, it's not. Mind Hacking is entertaining, funny, and highly relatable.

[Brigham · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a fast read, but most of it was fluff. A lot of "do this and watch everything change." There is one paragraph that specifically decries magical thinking, but within 20 pages he's telling you to pick something you want and write it down 15 times a day. The example he gives is Scott Adams writing "I want to be rich" and then picking two great stocks within the year. It won't hurt to do that, but if that's not magical thinking, what is?

Otherwise, it's a lot of self-improvement greatest hits, sort of a Feeling Good meets The Secret meets 7 Habits of Highly Effective People meets Baby Steps. It skims the surface of a lot of good ideas, but doesn't take time to reinforce them.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having seen that I'd read David Allen's "Getting Things Done", Sir John Hargrave asked if I'd read and critique this, his latest, which will become available to the public early this year. A short book, a fast read, easily understandable, and practical, for me at least, I speed read it, but plan on taking the author's advice to read it again, implementing his suggestions. I like this book very much and highly recommend it.

[Clement Cheung · Rating 1 out of 5]

Should have been called 1000 nerdy stories you've heard a thousand times with occasional simple obvious ideas.

Author spends way too much time rambling on irrelevant stories you've heard a thousand times if you're an actual nerd. Then he talks about how cool nerds are and how cool mind hacking is, then a manifesto of mind hacking. Finally, I got to the actual hacks. More irrelevant stories followed by a simple point that should have taken only one sentence.

And if you have read any other book on this topic at all, there's absolutely nothing new here. It's time stolen from me that I'll never get back. 😠

[Sonya Dutta Choudhury · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind Hacking joins popular predecessors in the change-your-life-by-transforming-your-habits category. Among the notables are Charles Duhigg’s The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business, John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister’s Willpower: Rediscovering The Greatest Human Strength, and Richard Wiseman’s 59 Seconds: Think A Little, Change A Lot. Hargrave has read these, and refers to them and to others, drawing on their research even as he programs his own “hacks”.

Hargrave grew up in a small town in the US, and learnt programming as a teen on a Commodore 64 computer his parents bought him. An early taste for coding was accompanied by one for playing pranks, like holding credit cards in the names of celebrities. Somewhere along the way, the promising programmer turned into an alcoholic and a drug addict. This had alarming consequences.

“The US Secret Service stormed into my living room,” he says. Hargrave had applied for and received a credit card in the name of US President Barack Obama, therefore, becoming the subject of a secret service investigation. The prank may have been harmless, but Hargrave could have got into real trouble if the secret service had found drugs in his apartment. http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/xvE4u...

It was after this incident that Hargrave started studying the human mind and trying to understand how it could be reprogrammed to change bad habits. “I scoured textbooks of psychology, neuroscience and computer science. I immersed myself in the latest research. I collected techniques from the greatest minds in history, from Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin to Nikola Tesla,” he writes.

Mind Hacking, the result of these efforts, is an interesting analysis of the human mind. For the most part, the mind is compared to a computer. “It struck me that a lot of the feelings and thoughts I was experiencing were like Adobe products: powerful, but riddled with bugs.” At other times, the mind is likened to a misbehaving dog that will not sit still. Or a movie.

The book features a series of techniques, with a 21-day target to achieve success. These techniques help in mastering the mind, to achieve what Hargrave terms a Jedi-like ability to concentrate. They include studying the workings of the mind, reducing bugs like distractions, writing down goals, and repeating and reiterating the goals. One such is on reprogramming thoughts like “Everything I do ends in failure...” to “Everything I do ends in failure... but hold on. Some things I do are actually quite successful, like…”.

Become a super user who can log into a more powerful account that can access and then control your mind, says Hargarve. Analyse the mind, re-imagine goals and fix the bugs so you have a better life.

Many of the techniques are not new. But Hargrave manages to reference each in a catchy way. “Imagine that you wake up tomorrow in a parallel universe. Everything in this universe is the same, except for one big difference: money has been replaced by attention. All citizens have little meters attached to their heads, right between the eyes, that show where they have been spending their limited daily supply of attention,” he writes, pointing out that we multitask not because that makes us more productive, but because we are addicted to it. Each email alert and instant message gives us a tiny burst of informational pleasure.

Besides the stories and the illustrations, the book also provides a link to a free app on www.mindhacki.ng. This app can help break bad habits and form new ones in 21 days. Worth a read and a try.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a few ways, I could relate to the author: He done f'd up, and was called out on it in a very scary, bureaucratic way, and that was the kick in the head to change his life. I get that, I've had it happen, and really do empathize and relate at the most personal level. At the same time, I found Hargrave's tone and voice so very, very irritating that I couldn't read his book. This is the book of a guy who surrounds himself with yes-men (but they're being TOTALLY honest, and no-one gets fired for saying no, they just don't want to because they TOTALLY agree with him, except once every three months when they don't, because they don't want to seem like sycophants, you know?), who feels like he has enough to say to fill an entire book, and proceeds to fill a book with a superficial overview of conflicting theories, methods and processes, as put forth by more successful writers. It's just annoying, really. This book could have had twice the info in half the pages, and it would be infinitely more readable than what was published. Do yourself a favor and go read How to Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero; you'll be glad you did.

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book that helps you handle your own brain as it was a computer and you the programmer. Many things where already told by somebody else many times but the systematization was really clear and helpful to set strategies and targets. It is really a self-help book.

Mi é piaciuto molto questo libro che insegna a gestire il proprio cervello come se fosse un computer e noi i suoi programmatori. Molte cose erano state giá dette in passato da altri, ma la sistematizzazione ha reso il tutto molto piú chiaro ed utile nello stabilire scopi e strategie. Questo é davvero un manuale di auto-aiuto.

THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND Gallery, Threshold, Pocket Books FOR THE PREVIEW!

[Sonita Soth · Rating 5 out of 5]

- nicht nur theoretisch, sondern sehr praxisnahe
-super Methoden
-man bekommt eine andere Sichtweise auf das Gehirn, Denken, Tun..
-witzig geschrieben

[BridgetT · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a 'self-help' book. (Boring)
This is a 'how to' book. (Most entertaining)
This book was so much fun to listen to. Naratted by the author.
The delivery was hilarious.
And I learned a couple of new techniques to show me how to stay focused.
SQUIRREL!!!
And how not to be distracted by random thoughts.
SQUIRREL! !!
A fun approach to taming an errant mind.
I've been using, successfully, some of these techniques since the (19)'60s.
Very, very, good.
Not to mention all the info on how computing machines, personal computers, and apps have evolved over the last 70 years. Incredible.
I think, therefore I am ... able to adjust how I think.
Think about it 😉

[فادي · Rating 3 out of 5]

أحبّ مثل هذه الكتب لسببين:
1- أنها تقدم المعلوم لديك بطريقة مبتكرة.
2- أنها مرتبطة "بالفعل" بشكل مباشر.
فلا تتوقع أن تستفيد منها إن لم تطبق على الأقل التمارين اليومية.
بعض فصول الكتاب متقاطعة بشكل كبير مع أدبيات الكتب التسويقية، لكن في بعض فصوله إبداع وربط مميز.
الفكرة من الكتاب هي: اتباع تقنيات للحفاظ على عقلك في أوج طاقته، إضافة لمراقبة عقلك من الخارج.
فيه بعض الشطحات والخيالات ( لا بأس كل كتب الإدارة كذلك ) لكن في مجمله جيّد.

[Vaibhav Pujari · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a software developer and gamer, and I found this book easy to understand and effective because the analogies used and perspective seemed to match with the way I am used to look at things. Although I don't think this book will be any less useful for non-software people.

[Krystian U · Rating 3 out of 5]

General knowledge, nothing new if you read some self-help books

[Lindsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a bit of a different self-help/self-improvement/mental fixer-upper/whatever you want to call it type of book. It compares the mind to that of lines of code, saying the mind is malleable and can easily be manipulated. Hargave states our negative thought loops contribute to our negative decisions, leaking down to our negative actions and our negative outlooks on life, yada yada yada.

Readers are giving mental exercises to do each day, including reciting your own positive thought loop. One example would be if, say, you want to go back to school, you avoid saying to yourself "I will never go to school. I am too old for that. I can't afford school. I'll just be stuck in the same job forever" but instead say something as simple as "I will go back to school". It's that age-old Power of Positive Thinking® wisdom that our more hippie friends would always give us. Bless them.

There is something to be said about creating this positive thought loops. Through sharing his personal experiences curbing his alcoholism, sharing the rise to success of people like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs, Hargrave shares stories of hope as well as more mind games for the reader to practice.

The point of this book is to follow its instructions but, surprisingly, I found them to be a bit vague. The exercises themselves were easy to follow and, I felt, were helpful, but people like me need a HARD SCHEDULE to follow, because my mind is always going in a circle, a zig-zag, and across the street to get a coffee, all at once.

I'm going to still look through this periodically, as this was probably one of the more practical and down-to-earth self-improvement/etc. books that I've ever read. It wasn't really as new-agey crunchy granola-y as others I've read, and I appreciate that. *Note: I do like a crunchy granola-y self help book on occasion*.

At the end of the book, there are practice sheets to do write down when you do your exercises, how long they take, what the outcome was, etc. I just wrote down some of the exercises on a separate sheet because I'm SO not about that life where you write in your books. Mentally, I just CANT hack my mind to do that.

[Joshua Gross · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book last night at dinner and just finished it. I have to admit that self help books are my little guilty pleasure, but I liked this one a lot, mostly because it has a lot of taking action. When I was a teenager my mother made me read this awful Dr. Phil book where he goes on and on about how to figure out what's wrong with yourself and then tells you if you read his book and do his dumb exercises properly and just right you'll get better. Except that's horseshit and all you're left with is a long list of your faults. This book breaks everything down into very geeky programming language and makes you do things, every day, that will move you toward the person you want to be. Specific things to do, goals to set, programming to undo and rewrite. It's kind of neat. Will it do anything? Who knows, but it'll be fun trying.

[Madhu Mitha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely worth reading. I really fell in love with this book. It was a great and easy read. Software Engineers can easily relate to the topics discussed in the book. I was just curious if the author really intended the Software Engineers to be the primary audience. Well written. I also love the fact that the author embraces open source so well that he released the PDF version of the book for free. I would definitely buy this book as a gift for friends.

[Becky · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author is very excited with his concept of taking control of one's mind, much as a software designer develops or edits software. Many references to computers, software, and "geek" personalities. I found some of his ideas potentially helpful; however, as a Christian, I would adapt these ideas accordingly. For instance, writing things down and the power of repetition could (and should!) be powerful tools for Bible study. The author also speaks of two realities, both being part of self, and much of the book sounds like Buddhism.

[Jen · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF - I liked the concept originally and the viewing the brain as a computer is something I’ve done since I was a child. But he lost me at using brain hacking to train yourself (a woman) to believe that you are safe walking at night. GTFO. Some serious straight (most likely white) male privilege showing up here.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book tried to hard to be a geeky self-help book. Most of the advice wasn't new and I didn't feel like reading the surrounding text. The author mentioned the Nerdist which I would recommend over this.

[Cheryl L.E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt this was a pretty valuable book. I recommend it for anyone feeling a little stuck in life. I listened to the audio book but, because of the exercises at the end, I think having a hard copy would be handy.

[Kristy Cooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the concept and framework he presents here, but he's way to preoccupied with the successes/habits of tech bros and heads of state. Meh

[Sohaib Kacemi · Rating 5 out of 5]

very practical book

[Orcun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind Hacking
Imagine a parallel world where attention, not money, is currency. You live in that “attention economy.” You pay “attention taxes” all the time – watching TV, fiddling with your smartphone or viewing ads.

Use the "Five Whys" technique to reveal the roots of a bad loop by asking “why,” over and over up to five times, drilling down if necessary to get a real answer.

[Camilla Leurs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very enjoyable book. Author is also a great narrator. Different take on meditation, great for computer geeks. Forces you to make actionable plans and encourages advancing on them. Would recommend.

[Danielle Ferguson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a lot of steps for improving yourself and reaching your goals but I fell asleep on it a lot! This is probably more for someone who sis in business and wants to start their own business or desires success beyond the normal.