A new rationalist self-improvement book: the 12 Levers

I'm publishing a book that I think can fairly be described as a rationalist approach to self-improvement. Whereas many self-help books focus mainly on stories and what worked well for the author, our book takes a very different approach. My co-author, Jeremy Stevenson, and I read over 100 of the most popular self-improvement books of all time and carefully reviewed more than 20 types of therapy in an attempt to answer the question: What are all of the most useful psychological strategies for improving your life? Every time a book or therapy said to do something or provided a method or technique, we extracted it. We then carefully categorized the ~500 techniques. Our conclusion, which surprised us, was that to a reasonable degree of approximation, we were able to subsume all of these numerous approaches within just 12 high-level psychological strategies. We call these "The 12 Levers," which is also the name of our book. We also investigated the evidence behind each of these levers. The book does include stories, but they are not the focus - we choose one or two stories to tell about the history of each Lever or a person who embodies it to help make it vivid and memorable.If this sounds interesting, we'd love for you to pre-order the book (pre-orders help books get noticed and succeed). As a thank you for pre-ordering, we give 5 free perks, including access to a tool to help you apply the techniques from the book.With that, here are some lessons we learned during this process of researching and writing this book:1. A lot of techniques are recycled or repackagedTake mindfulness, an extremely useful technique for a wide range of problems. It’s defined by meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn as “the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally.” The Pali word 'sati' (roughly translated as mindfulness) appears in early Buddhist teachings dating back about 2,500 years. Mindfulness is now used in multiple modern therapies,