Hansen shares research on 5,000 individuals' performances at work and uses regression analysis on the results to make the case for seven behaviors of top performers.

While I have little to nitpick over in terms of the seven principles - which include such behaviors as doing less but focusing on the things you do intensely, creating value in your work, and finding purpose and passion in what you do, to name a few - the execution of the book leaves a little to be desired. Instead of giving me a short list of seven words I could commit to memory, they each sound like a slogan: "Do less, then obsess," "Don't just learn, loop" and "P-Squared" (Passion and Purpose). Each chapter ends with a short outline reiterating the main points that I had just read, making it very repetitive. Hansen tells us in the introduction that these approaches are new, and "working smarter" rather than "harder" (more hours in the work week). This may be true, but in my personal experience a lot of the information was not new, and I thought his constant references to "work harder" mode of thinking worked as a bit of a straw man argument. For example, one study he mentions in particular was the one where 10,000 hours of practice is enough to make you an expert. He argues that you need to learn in a particular way and get a feedback "loop" going, rather than repetition. I've heard the 10,000 hour rule before, and it never would've occurred to me to interpret it in such a stringent way. If I wanted to be an expert concert pianist, I surely wouldn't practice scales for 10,000 hours or I would only get good at scales. Isn't in a given that as I become good at the basics, I would find ways to improve technique and introduce greater complexity as I went along? I would have liked to see less numbers of correlation or percentiles from the study and more concrete ways in which I could put the principles into practice. He also mentions very briefly some differences between men and women in a couple of these practices, and I would have liked to see that developed more. Perhaps because it was mostly based on this one study, that would have been outside of the scope of this book. ( )