Mahamudra for the Modern World
This is a 38 hour long course on Mahamudra, which is a type of Tibetan Buddhism. It mixes dharma-style explanations with guided practice. The explanatory parts tend to be quite long-winded and sounded like rambling to me. He also didn’t seem very concerned about making them sound scientific as there was a hint of mystical […]
Read more from the Psychology category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
High-Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer Way
Mike Mentzer was a world-class bodybuilder and this book explains his approach to bodybuilding. It appears that he had a very scientific approach, although the book doesn’t go into the science much, instead just stating the main points. Some of the big points are: go to failure on each set (excepting some cases like warmup […]
Read more from the Health category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Principles
Although a fairly dry read, I found this book valuable for providing a counterargument to some other management theories. Many people advise others to pick their battles and let people get away with being irrational if the decision is not obviously critical to the big picture. Furthermore, people often assume that this advice is objectively […]
Read more from the Business and Marketing category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State
This book had more mystical and religious content than other books on this topic that I’ve read. Aside from a few good points which can be found elsewhere, this book wasn’t very helpful.
Read more from the Psychology category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Roaring Silence: Discovering the Mind of Dzogchen
I heard about Dzogchen from Sam Harris’ book Waking Up in which he said that it was the best form of Buddhism that he came across because it was the most direct and had the least religious distraction. Roaring Silence seems mostly consistent with that. The biggest thing I learned from this book was the […]
Read more from the Psychology category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
The Three Body Problem
I really liked how this book was super physics-centric. It was very unique in this regard; typically science fiction deals with far-fetched ideas, but this one centered around the three-body problem and it’s chaotic solutions, which is very old school classical stuff. The world that the book creates feels a bit drab, so it ranks […]
Read more from the Science Fiction category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
The Ego Tunnel
This is a pretty deep book about the nature of consciousness. I sometimes found it hard to tell if what I was hearing was profound or obvious. I still don’t understand the central analogy with a tunnel: what specific properties of a tunnel map to specific properties of consciousness? I may have missed it, but […]
Read more from the Psychology category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Antifragile
Something is “antifragile” if it gains from disorder/uncertainty/randomness, as opposed to “robust” things that neither gain nor lose from disorder/uncertainty/randomness. I think this is an interesting concept that I hadn’t heard of or thought about before reading this book. Taleb discusses some ideas for how to apply the concept of antifragility to your life and […]
Read more from the Philosophy category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Radical Acceptance
This book is about a Buddhist-inspired approach to self-acceptance. I got the feeling that I wasn’t really in the target audience because I couldn’t relate to a lot of the material. I can see how it might be helpful for others, but in the end I don’t think I got much out of it.
Read more from the Personal Development category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Business Adventures
I read this book because I heard it was Bill Gates’ favorite business book. It is a collection of true stories about business events in the 1960s. The narration is quite detailed, sometimes describing the appearance of the scene and feelings of individuals. I found the stories pretty boring, partly because the stories are so […]
Read more from the Business and Marketing category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.