Nothing new here!

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

New material would have been good and to have been delivered at a faster more concise pace. It was really dull.

What was most disappointing about Brendon Burchard’s story?

He took a good hour at the beginning to get to even explain what the habits were. I know now that's because they are nothing that anyone in personal development won't already know.

How could the performance have been better?

Faster, more engaging, better stories, and having something to actually say instead of constant redirects to various of his websites to get you into his funnel.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from High Performance Habits?

All of it, he isn't as engaging as Robbins, as energetic as Cardone, or original as Rohn.

Any additional comments?

I like Brendon and whilst I have only seen a few of his videos I always thought he had a lot to offer. In this book he doesn't do that. In the genre it is slow paced, dull and nothing original. He gives a vignette early on where an old client asked him to give him the gold or take the hi-way, well there was no gold in this Brendon so time to take the hi-way!

67 people found this helpful

Waffle

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

I invested about 90 minutes in to this book and found myself getting increasingly irritated. There is so much unnecessary waffle it is staggering. I get the impression this guy has some serious hang ups around his own personal credibility. He goes on and on about his experience and accomplishments and expertise that it rapidly gets tedious. When someone feels compelled to promote themselves this hard it is very hard not to mistrust them.

Then you find yourself thinking that no one that has any experience of dealing with successful, high achieving people could talk like this. No serious person could ever put up with all of the nonsense just to get to six key points

There is probably some useful content here but if there is, it is so buried in a load of repeated boring chest beating that for me it will remain undiscovered.

The irony is that he even says that his original draft was 1400 pages and that it was challenging to reduce. My advise would be to try to boil it down to 14 pages then he might be on to a winner.

Would you ever listen to anything by Brendon Burchard again?

No.

Who might you have cast as narrator instead of Brendon Burchard?

The content not the narration is the issue.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from High Performance Habits?

I would reduce everything by 90%

53 people found this helpful

Sometimes the lessons get lost in the marketing

There are some nice principles in this book and some good habits you can definitely apply for results, but you have to get through a lot of hype, marketing, credibility set up and self-aggrandisement before you get to the meaty stuff. That has caused me to give up before now with some of Brendon Burchard's books, but this one I persisted.
I don't know that anything here is earth-shatteringly brilliant but certainly, they are principles and habits that we can all benefit from. There's a lot of unnecessary padding in this book, again a feature I find common with Brendon Burchard books. The struggle I have with this author is that what he teaches is generally good and useful but it's so verbose and full of the humble brag that it becomes off-putting. I think Brendon is a great person to learn from but please don't copy his style. This book could have benefitted from being at least half as long.

15 people found this helpful

The unbearable beginning

After an hour of being told relentlessly and repeatedly of how amazing this book is with minimal substance I gave up. I figured that when someone has to sell their book this hard it probably isn’t that good. I had other books of similar topic I’d be better of spending my time on. The author is unbearable.

42 people found this helpful

waste of time just a constant repeat.

That isn't any depth to it, it's a waste of time he repeats and repeats, I got this boom on an offer I'm glad I didn't waste my money on it. It's CRAP.

read the chimp paradox that's is key to habits.

11 people found this helpful

One hour in, still listening to a sales pitch

Nothing but a terrible sales pitch for the guys other services. Turned it off inside the first hour. Won’t be listening to any more.

10 people found this helpful

An Thinly Disguised Exercise in Self-Promotion

After 10hrs and 35mins waiting for the book to turn the corner, I am now going to find it hard to stay objective. I am well aware that the author would no doubt disagree with what I am about write, and class the spirit and tone of the review as 'bad energy' or something similar, but frankly he spends so much of this book listing all of the reasons why you should listen to his advice (and give him your email, and watch his videos), that a little re-balancing seems necessary, if I only for my own catharsis.

As the title of this review suggests, this book is about one thing, Brendon Burchard. So very much of this book is spent talking about his career, his upbringing or anecdotes from his life that he deems to be relevant to the framework. This is made all the more difficult by the fact that he himself, has himself insists on narrating it, and in the style of an online keynote to-boot! His forced laughter at his own poor stabs at humor is eye-wateringly annoying. So many of the chapters in this book are populated by paragraphs that are essentially just lists of the authors accolades, as measured in number of video views, financial compensation, or clients he has coveted, crises he has resolved, difficulties he has overcome, then usually concluded with an almost nauseatingly insincere reference to how "blessed" he has been to have achieved such lofty highs. It does genuinely feel like the author did not see the need to research many other examples outside of himself and his experience. The '3 years' it took to research this book could only have been 3 years of thinking about not much more than himself.

Of course one could forgive, and even expect these things from the self-improvement genre. The problem is that the once Brendan has convinced you to believe, or at least be open to, what he has to say, the lack of utter lack of clarity with which he goes to tried to explain his (not-so-complicated) system of 6 key habits is infuriating. He jumps from self-aggrandising anecdote to the 'hard-science' and 'data' amassed mostly, it would seem, by his beloved "high-performance" institute (an apparently pseudo-academic organisation who's main aim seems to be giving Brendan and his many premium products an air of academic and scientific validity, though even a cursory dig through the website finds his claims about it difficult to substantiate). He mentions his other books numerous times and constantly directs you to the HPI website to take assessments or access tools but which in truth is clearly designed as an email capture tool. This by his own admission, is his main marketing strategy. This is book is about why you need buy his other books, and buy in to his online eco-system.

This book may be a #1 New York Times Best Seller, but it seems to have become so in the same way that Taylor Swift's music video become the most watched on YouTube, through clever marketing and the viral effect that they spark, and not because of the substance of their content. High Performance Habits, The High Performance Institute, His High Performing Clients and yes, a High Performing Marketer, all helped to legitimise and sell this book, but in the end, the author failed in the first of those crucial '5 moves' in the writing of a bestselling book, that of actually producing a good book before looking to sell one.

27 people found this helpful

OK but could be better

Main issues here are...

1. the too - deliberate - delivery - of - the - author. I write it this way to illustrate my point. Hesitation for effect now and then is fine but it becomes annoying.
2. content is OK but there's a lot of waffle leading up to and after the actual points being made and the advice being given. Audio could have been reduced by at least 25% in total with some judicious editing.
3. slightly holier than thou attitude with it's emphasis on 'service to others' and spirituality and healthy living. I know they have a place but bear in mind not everyone's a believer in a higher power
4. frequent references to support tools being available from a website which doesn't exist.

All that said, I'd probably listen again if push came to shove.

8 people found this helpful

A bit slow to start with

The habits themselves are quite interesting if you can manage to get through a few hours of repetition of the very same ideas again and again. Especially in the introduction it feels like hours upon hours of just trying to make you excited and interested in the ideas. I bought the book, I'm already interested.

3 people found this helpful

Couldn’t go past 15 minutes...

Introductions are pivotal for great books in this genre, however so much of the intro is just asking ‘do you plateu? ‘Do you want to unlock your full potential?’ Rather than going in to a logical reasonings why this book will improve several aspects of people’s lives.

I got frustrated, and judging the rest of the reviews I’m not alone!

2 people found this helpful