What are Brain Snacks? Well, there's an old adage, "Success
leaves tracks, and failure does, too." In other words,
if someone is particularly successful in an area of his or
her life, then there are things that person is doing day in
and day out to produce that success. Likewise, if someone
is particularly unsuccessful at something, there are
probably things he or she has done that have become
obstructions. Throughout my life, I've tried to learn from
other people's successes and failures, as well as my own
success and failures as a teenager. In this second edition
of Brain Snacks, I've updated some of the "snacks" with
new information and corrected a few typos along the
way to give you a refined version of the successes and
failures I have learned from. So, in essence, Brain Snacks
are effective ideas and strategies, with detailed tactics,
to help you turbo-charge your life. They're delicious and
nutritious pieces of information that can help you become
happier, healthier, and more successful in your life
and, ultimately, make the world a better place.
I had the idea to write this after I created a blog during
the summer of 2008 called "Brain Snacks," on which I
periodically wrote articles about topics I thought could
be helpful and interesting to my peer group. The blog
gained a small following, and my readers encouraged
me to keep writing. After two years of steady writing, a
friend of mine suggested an idea to me that I found intriguing:
why not make my blog a book? After all, he
said, I had already written most of the material: my blog
posts would probably make for a solid 150-paged paperback
book. I could make my teenage trials, tribulations,
and triumphs accessible to a larger audience and
on a more concrete level. At any rate, isn't it preferable
to learn from someone else's mistakes than from one's
own? I thought it was a brilliant idea.
I spent my first few weeks of summer vacation after my
junior year doing some additional writing. What I hadn't
expected, however, was for the compiling process
thereafter to be more challenging and time-consuming
than the entire writing process itself. The main obstacle
I had to overcome was rereading each individual Snack
with a fine-toothed comb to ensure that I had given
credit where credit was due. Previously, I had never cast
a thought to citing my material when I was blogging. I
informally attributed statistics and studies to the relevant
associations who had discovered and conducted
them, but I never made a formal bibliography, since the
levity of a blog generally doesn't call for one. Alas, I
spent hour upon hour citing facts I had acquired from
various sources and obtaining permission to reprint several
medical studies I wanted to use.
Then came the proofreading. Editing the book for errors
was an eye-opening experience. Looking back upon it,
it's really amazing how many times I thought I had a
perfect book--certainly not perfectly written, but perfect
with respect to grammar, spelling, and formatting. Even
more amazing was the feeling of discouragement that
gradually overcame me with each passing revision of
the book. There was always something that could be improved,
and with each correction I made, two more errors
seemed to reveal themselves. Finally, after I and a
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number of close friends had read each Snack about 20
times, I went ahead with the final step: reviews. What I
certainly never expected was to actually obtain reviews
from the authors, CEOs, and organizations whom I had
approached, but with a little luck and a lot of determination,
people like Brian Tracy and Sean Covey have
endorsed the book you are holding. Of the reviewers,
I'm also fortunate to have the endorsement of Holly
Johnson, a top orthopedic surgeon at Massachusetts
General Hospital in Boston; Clayton Jones, Chairman
of Jones & Bartlett Learning; and last, but certainly not
least, Dr. Mark Estes, a leading cardiologist in Boston
who wrote the foreword to this book.