The Myth of Freedom
Although this book was fairly down-to-earth relative to most Buddhist texts, I didn’t really get much out of it. It primarily focused on discussing psychological tendencies of people in general during the course of their daily lives. It had a more pessimistic/negative tone than other books of this type and I found it somewhat boring.
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
What I found interesting about this book is that it seemed to make an honest effort to explain non-dual experience to the reader. Most books that discuss non-duality shroud the concept in mystery so it’s hard to even believe that they are talking about something really important. This was the first book that really convinced […]
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.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
This is a truly amazing book about why some societies are more successful than others at developing technology and conquering the world. The author explains how geographical and environmental factors are highly determinant, which implies that genetic and cultural factors are much less significant. The most important factor in the early stages of civilization was access […]
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Clean Code
This book provides a good overview of best practices for coding. I liked that it took concrete opinionated stances like: 1. “The only way to make the deadline—the only way to go fast—is to keep the code as clean as possible at all times.” (p6) 2. “Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading vs. writing is […]
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Dataclysm
Although this book wasn’t particularly entertaining, it did have quite a few impressive data-backed observations of human psychology that I’ve never seen before. It had a lot more content than the couple of blog posts I saw from the author, so it was worth the read.
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.
Deep Value
The thesis of this book is that the worst quality stocks have the best expected returns, as a portfolio. Even the these low-quality stocks have a much higher probability of going bankrupt individually, they also have a much higher probability of shooting up in price. So it sounds like a classic high volatility situation where […]
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Zero to One
This book has really good reviews, but I think it is mostly due to “success bias”: people have a tendency to overrate anything associated with successful people. There were very few original ideas in this book, if any. The main thesis is that we live in a time of technological stagnation and that entrepreneurs should […]
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.
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
Overview of the basic concepts of marketing. The laws are simple, but they aren’t always obvious. The emphasizes that successful marketing is more about appealing to the customer’s psychology than their rational decision making process.
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Crossing the Chasm
This book provides a great mental model for how high-tech marketing works. It presents a technology adoption bell curve divided into customer groups based on how early they will adopt a new technology. The groups correspond to innovators who try new technologies for fun, early adopters (or visionaries) who are the first to find a […]
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The Black Swan
This book is about the idea that people over-rely on the gaussian distribution and that big events happen much more often than a gaussian distribution would predict. It’s an important concept, but there wasn’t much useful information in the book.
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