Using cell phone data, he found that if you know where a person is in the morning, you can predict their whereabouts the rest of the day about 93% of the time. And even the most unpredictable people can be pinned down at least 80% of the time.
I thought the most compelling paragraph of the book was this one on the surprising uniformity of our routines:
We tend to exaggerate the differences among us, believing that we are much less or far more regular than our friends and neighbors. The truth is, however, that you might be a cool artista, a rocker, an accountant, or a CEO of a major corporation, but when it comes to quantifying your daily movements, your predictability is likely to be only a few percentage points different from that guy next door. As far as our predictability is concerned, we are back to the familiar word of Poisson and Gauss, in which everyone is similar, everything is "normal". You may cover hundreds of miles each day while I cover only three, but you are just as much a prisoner of your habits as I am of mine. The never-ceasing thrill of spontaneity is a mirage at best. Instead, a deeply comforting regularity drives our whereabouts, to a much higher degree than we are willing to acknowledge.
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As interesting as the above paragraph is, I would not highly recommend the book unless you are into reading about crusades n' shit. I like my books to be straight to the point, and this one was anything but. Dear authors who are going to skirt the main point for hundreds of pages: Could you please throw a reader a note or something? Like "hey, skip to page 180 if you'd rather not donate 5 hours of your life to reading about Belgrade's 16th Century knights"?
I rated it a 3 on enjoyment, 5 on value/insight, and 3 on well-written. You can view my ratings for all books here.
