Articles, Ideas, Books and/or Concepts that have changed your life

"It's not important to get it right; it's important to get it going."

I believe this encapsulates the dangers of perfectionism, the importance of iterating, and the reason we should risk failure. And I find the concept difficult to apply in some aspects of my life. I believe as you progress down a particular route in life your mind's pattern recognition will find meaning in particular quotes, books because you are trying to. And by extension, you will meet like-minded people the more committed you are. Like buying a new car and suddenly seeing it everywhere. Until we have immersive VR, I believe that some experiences must be learned first-hand - and emotionally.

A quote for me:

"It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ Yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ Of what is found there." - William Carlos Williams

Lucifer Principle -- Howard Bloom.

Some books:

"The Fountainhead" - gave me the gift of self-confidence

"The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution" - helps me understand where I come from and where I fit in the Biosphere

"The Use of Knowledge in Society" - This, along with other pieces on economics and capitalist anarchism, gave me an appreciation for distributed non-hierarchical systems. (http://www.econlib.org/Library/Essays/hykKnw1.html)

Paul Graham's stuff - Got me to the point where I'm quitting my job in two weeks.

I read a ton of fantasy, sci fi, and historical fiction growing up. I'm sure that has something to do with my grand imagination, distaste for authority, and idealism.

More than any books or articles, I've been influenced directly by the people in my life, especially friends, mentors, family, and girls I wanted to impress.

PG & Joel Spolsky, the Alchemist, the Little Prince.

"The Kingdom of God is Within You" - Leo Tolstoy "Atlas Shrugged" - Ayn Rand

Free 10-day Buddhist meditation retreats, incl. room & board, at one of the many Vipassana Meditation Centers world-wide (http://www.dhamma.org). Very old-school; the real deal.

The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0884270610). Most real-world systems have a single constraint that limit the system's ability to achieve goal units. The best way to improve the system is to (0) define the system's owners and their goal for the system, (1) identify the constraint (2) improve the situation at the constraint in a way that does not require significant investment; (3) if the improvement resulting from the previous is not sufficient, decide how to improve the constraint in a way that does require significant investment; (4) subordinate everything else in the system to the decision arrived at in the previous step; (5) start over at step 1.

The Game, by Neil Strauss (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060554738)

When I was a kid, the documentary series Connections. It was the first time I'd ever seen someone follow vectors through history instead of recounting it one period at a time, like most books and classes do.

Discovering Lisp was a big one. This was in 1983, when the default programming language was Pascal. Lisp seemed (and in retrospect was) startlingly better. There was no one single book or quotation, but I remember how excited I was to get my hands on a photocopy of the InterLisp manual.

Kenneth Clark's documentary series Civilisation (and the accompanying book) impressed me a lot. In fact, it was clearly the model for Connections. I've never read anything else better about art. His ideas are extremely subversive, but few get it because he usually speaks in code. And he had access to stuff like no one else ever will again.

I also learned a lot from his book The Nude.

One of the biggest influences on my ideas about startups was an essay by TJ Rogers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. I don't remember the title, but it cut through the usual corporate bullshit like a knife. For me the important thing was not just what he said, but that one could even be that candid.

Of all the books I've read in the last 5 years or so, Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology is probably the one that stuck most in my head.

Anything by Heinlein - "Starship Troopers" especially Ayn Rand - "Atlas Shrugged"

I'm not sure if "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" changed my life, but it reassured me I was on the right track in starting a business. It reads very well today and I'd recommend it to any professional.

I was particularly struck by this quote:

"I really don't know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in grey flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness -- they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the side lines watching the parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a grey flannel suit."

The half dozen or so books about Richard Feynman life and approach to problems.

(somewhat cliched but) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

GEB.

I only read non-fiction that's counterintuitive. I figure, hey, I'm pretty smart, so if it's intuitive then I can probably figure it out on my own. A list of stuff I cite most often:

No Contest & Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

PG's essays & ITConversations interviews

The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto

The Singularity is Near by Kurzweil

This graph: http://alexkrupp.com/picture_library/plot.jpg

Dee Hock's essay on leadership

A handful of blog posts by Mark Cuban

All Marketers are Liars & Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. All of the books that Seth recommends are also worth reading.

Bruce Schneier's interview on ITConversations

Magic Ink, an essay by Bret Victor

War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

The Cluetrain Manifesto (the book)

I'm sure there's a lot more, but that's what comes to mind right now.

:the_dip => 'by Seth Godin', :essays => 'by Paul Graham', :art_of_the_start => 'by Guy Kawasaki', :the_innovators_solution => 'by Clayton Christensen & Michael Raynor', :rich_dad_poor_dad => 'by Robert Kiyosaki', :seven_habits_of_highly_effective_people => 'by Stephen Covey', :stanford_technology_ventures_program => 'by Reid Hoffman (i.e., the session he did for STVP)'

For me, it's mainly been people and their lives. The ideas and such flow from that.

This is an undergrad teacher who has had the most influence on me: http://www.scriptoriumdaily.com/author/john-mark-reynolds/

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

But not for the standard reasons of food safety or socialism

To get a real taste of how regular people lived and struggled back then. That was the life my great-grandparents and grandparents escaped so that I could have a real life.

So whenever I "think" things are tough, I just slow down and imagine that it's Packingtown, Chicago in 1906. Things suddenly seem a whole lot brighter now.

Here and now is a special time and place. Let's not any one of us squandor it.

Hackers and Painters, especially How to Make Wealth. I grew up overseas, and really didn't have a decent grasp of how the whole money thing worked until I started reading up on economics and money. How to Make Wealth really crystalized a lot for me.

in no particular order:

Myers-Brigs Model for Personality

"Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank

John Boyd's OODA Loop as a model for competitive decision making

Decision Analysis techniques: in particular decision trees, expected value of perfect information, and good decision bad outcome

BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) concept for negotiation planning

"Secrets of Consulting" by Gerald M. Weinberg

"Bionomics" by Michael Rothschild

SimCity computer game

Analysis of Competing Hypotheses methodology

wiki (social process) model for small team collaborative document development

community of practice model for knowledge management

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein (in particular TANSTAAFL)

activation energy, catalyst, and phase change concepts from physics/chemistry

Amplify Positive Deviance model from Jerry Sternin (Save the Children)

"The Empowered Manager" by Peter Block, in particular his trust vs. agreement matrix

"Crossing the Chasm" & "Inside the Tornado" by Geoffrey Moore

"Maneuver Warfare Handbook" by William Lind

"Change Your Brain, Change Your Life" by Daniel Amen

"Micromotives and Macrobehavior" by Thomas Schelling

Appreciative Inquiry Techniques

Ideas/books/concepts of George Lakoff and his colleagues. In the same way, Jeff Hawkins. Their approach to cognition as a problem that is comprehensible is incredibly far-reaching.

In a similar vein, the writing and blog of Scott Adams:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/

The vast majority of it is humor, and the inspiring pieces are subtle, but they're like a honey bunch of oats in your cereal (except more rare (and with better metaphors than this)).

Lisp, SICP, PAIP

No specific book or article, but for me it's been what I've read about Memetics and Evolutionary Psychology. It's not only enabled me to understand human behavior, including my own, but has influence the way I think about everything from career to diet.

My grandpa giving me "How to win friends and Influence people" in 7th grade.

My Mom teaching me to code in 6th grade.

Tao te ching, Shakespeare, and the pharse "Your will only have 2 friends: your dad and a dollar in your pocket"

Star Trek, Plays by George Bernard Shaw, Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, Firefly

Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I saw it when I was a kid, and didn't realize how big an effect it had had on me until I watched it again a couple of years ago.