Personally, A Farewell to Arms has likely caused the biggest change. I became really absorbed in the book and at the same time in life was expecting my first child. I didn’t know the story at all, and was not expecting the ending in the least.
There have been many things in life that have taught me to enjoy what I have because it can all be gone in an instant. But that book combined with where I was in life cemented the lesson.
I’m interested in how Man’s Search caused a change in your life.
Holy shit, that's a bad time to read that book. I think I may share that book with you as one of the most life-changing books. I remember crying during the ending as a teenager.
I don't think any book has significantly changed my life. I've read a pretty wide range of books, and remain basically the same schmuck I've always been.
Something Doctorow said in a blog post (not one of his books surprisingly) has had the most impact on my life (paraphrased): “You shouldn’t have a bug out bag, you should have a bug in bag. You’ll live longer as a group than on your own, so prepare with supplies and tools to help others.”
"The Great American Health Hoax" by Raymond Francis made me understand that health is not gained with medicines but by avoiding toxins and eating nutricious foods.
When young and before I knew better, I had two surgeries that should not have been done. Or, for one, not executed in the manner it was; and it was only necessary because of an unavoidable gap in insurance coverage.
Ha, when I remind myself, the other was necessary because of a string of failures initially culminating in an incompetent doctor and the PT he lauded. Then compounded a year later by a surgeon who'd rather operate than image and then was quite lackadaisical about recovery.
Beyond the topic of doctors, we have so much sugar in our diet, in good part because ADM needs to move corn products for profit. I imagine they've now cornered the market on beet sugar, as well, although I don't know. And the cane sugar growers who continue to lobby very effectively e.g. with the leverage of Florida state and its political influence.
"Modern medicine" is very limited in what it can actually, thoroughly fix. Staying healthy is the bulwark, but with a lot of financially motivated people poking holes in this for their own benefit.
I agree it should be required reading in college. However, it has one glaring fault: it doesn't provide many tips on motivating yourself to take personal interest in others. We geeks like gizmos and logic and stuff, people bore us.
It's like a health book that reveals eating more vegetables and whole grains, and getting more exercise is the way to better health. That's useful info, but the hard part is motivating yourself to eat such and exercise often enough.
Nausea by Sartre. I used to really struggle with existential anxiety, and still do to some degree. That book took away much of that concern, it gave me a new way to think about meaning in life
I haven't read that one, but I read is Pre-suasion last year, and it was definitely an eyeopener. Have quite a lot of bookmarks in that one still. Need to get around to Influence too.
“Real Food, Fake Food” was absolutely critical in getting me into a mindset of caring about the quality of my food. That mindset shift has led to 100+lbs of weight loss.
The 4-Hour Workweek - made me quit my job and start a business. Since then I've been able to travel internationally for the first time in my life while working as much as I want.
I would second the 4-Hour Workweek, yet I am still searching for a profitable idea. How long did it take you from reading the book to reaching the ability to quit your job?
Pretty much all businesses are automatable. Just hire good people and have good processes in place for them to follow.
For example, WP Curve was even able to automate the process of hiring dozens of developers. You would've that that it would require a very manual intervention by the owner: https://wpcurve.com/hiring-developers/
With 7+ Billion people on the planet most people have done something similar to any idea. Isn't the point in the book that you can still succeed by creating your own flavor of an idea or selling that idea to a new market?
That might be the point. I didn't make it that far because after what seemed like 60 pages of the author talking about how he's naturally a world class performer at pretty much everything he's ever tried to do in his entire life I got tired of the bullshit time-share salesman style of writing.
Where does the actual advice start? This book is recommended pretty much every time someone asks a similar question, I might be willing to give it another shot if there's actual content somewhere in it.
Also, did this guy create a successful business outside of his self-help stuff before he started writing these books?
Prior to reading the book, I had a retire-early mindset. My idea was to work hard at high paying jobs and save a lot so I could retire early. After reading the book, I had the idea to create multiple streams of income in order to achieve the goal of retiring early.
Others have mentioned that it's not easy to find a lifestyle business that earns you enough income to live off of, and I've also had that problem. However, I've had partial success. I don't think I'd have ever pursued this path without reading 4HWW. It's not an instruction manual, though.
The problem isn't to find problem for which you can start a business. The problem is to find a problem for which you can start an automated business. That's much harder.
That's not the spirit of the 4HWW. The idea is to make a product that requires not much improvement, and people just buy it from your website, so essentially your 4 hours are spent doing accounting and basic customer support. You might have a part time guy to do server maintenance but that's about it. So essentially most of your revenue is profit for yourself, and you can run a "small" business with revenue in the 50-100K range.
If you start hiring full time workers, then your business has to scale a lot. Like revenue has to go to 500-1M range so you have enough to pay full time workers as well as money for yourself. That's just a completely different beast.
500-1M USD? If you hire full-time US workers then that's probably the case.
For me I hired a few remote part-timers around the world. So it costs me an order of magnitude less. And they're all awesome, so I barely have to lift a finger.
I think approaching an idea that already has existing solutions is better than trying to come up with a completely new idea. The existing solutions indicate that there is a market for it. Can you improve on those existing solutions, and deliver some value that is lacking in them?
In the book, Tim Ferris makes his money by selling phoney brain supplements to golfers. That's not a new idea, but it's a profitable one.
I think part of the reason I'll never have a great deal of money is that the idea of tricking someone into buying a useless product makes me uncomfortable. As does adding more plastic and trash into the world.
I read the 4 hour work week when we (wife and myself) were already travelling and working on our own companies (this was when it just came out first by the way); we both scaled down to working max 1 day a week, found that that made us create more and more projects. Found out we really do not like not working.
Could you elaborate on your lifestyle, please? What kind of job do you do on that max 1 day a week? How do you spend the rest of your time? How far do you travel? Do you stay long at one place or you'll constantly on the run? Do you have kids? If no - do you plan to have them? If yes - how do they manage with that lifestyle? Having your knowledge and experience, what would you have done differently? Thanks in advance!
Like I said; that 4hr workweek was like 10 years ago: since then the week is full again. But with multiple businesses (check my profile/linkedin). We hike a lot (few hours a day). When we worked less than a day we travelled through europe, now all over the world. We try to stay longer in one place when we can, but business meetings take us all over. No kids, consciously not ever.
I would not do a lot different but as you ask; I would have started real business networking far sooner. I am a tech guy and always surrounded myself with business guys so I would not have to. I think that was not so smart. I always thought I would be bad at it, but it just is not very hard. And with the right contacts, you can grow and achieve things much faster.
Interestingly, the biggest eye-opener of reading the 4HWW is the part when Ferriss defines the word muse. I used to only think that it was a dichotomy of 1) boring 9-5 selling out your soul for the rest of your life, or 2) VC-backed startup scaling like mad and ending in a 7+ figure acquisition, but never considered the option in between: lifestyle businesses that are "automated", so you can actually do other things with your life.
The "Why we sleep" book is just full of facts about the difference between a good nights sleep and a lack of sleep. There are so many things that fall apart when a few hours are taken off and nobody can be conscious of it, even though they are very very measurable. He also discusses thing like how two groups of people get a night of good sleep, they learn something and get 3 days of quality sleep. Then one of the groups has their sleep limited by several (3/4?) hours. The following day they get full nights rest, and the next day they are tested on what they learned earlier in the week and there were significant deficits for the group that had that one night of bad sleep in the middle of the week.
After reading about it, I've learned a lot more about sleep, but the greatest effect is that I really appreciate sleep more, make lots of time to optimize length and quality. Knowing all the info in the book it would be difficult to justify using an alarm clock to force yourself to rise before your body is ready.
Why we sleep has given me an immense amount of respect for sleep, something I rather apparently knew so little about. I've put off sleep for decades, and amidst this book I've come to understand that it's been a really stupid approach to realizing my goals.
I still don't understand sleep, but, Walker breaks down sleeps benefits & shows the data to back up why we should be getting a full night's rest. He has given me a newfound respect for something I wantonly would throw away at my next personal whim. Silly me, it's been working against me the whole time.
Fewer late nights learning to code, and I'm making much better progress already in the memory department.
As for Cavey's book: Cavey takes a really interesting look at Jesus through a historical lens, coupled with all these little things I had missed in my own reading of the New Testament. It's full of goodies, and is one of those books I've got 20 copies of in my library to hand out like candy.
The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene. I know they are a bit dated by now, but when I read them they broadened my horizons and encouraged to review my religious standpoint from a scientific perspective.
The divided mind / healing back pain - Books by John E. Sarno.
To give you a background I have struggled with back pain all my life. After dozens of MRIs, X rays, physiotherapy, ayurveda, yoga, posture exercises, and spending almost 100,000 in the last 15 years on this, a simple book saved me.
The effect was so powerful that I could feel the symptoms fading while I was reading it. It gave me my life back. A few weeks ago I finally had the courage to teach my little one to walk without worrying about bending my back.
Now I feel that more people suffering from back pain, chronic fatigue, etc should be made aware of it. Here is a intro video about it [1]
Just as a follow up, I had every symptom that the book describes. Last night I couldn’t put the book down, at the end tried its recommendation and lo and behold my pain from “herniated” disks went away. Thanks again for this.
That is awesome to hear. I have created a small mp3 file for the 12 reminders [1]. If you ever get the pain just play the mp3 file to remind yourself of it again. Good luck! :)
Not sure if it is that simple. The main idea at least as per what I understood is that there is nothing wrong with your back or structure.
People with multiple herniated discs, "pinched nerves", etc never have back pain yet people with no structural abnormality suffer from paralyzing pains.
The reason is your mind. The logic being your brain tries to hide difficult emotions aka stress and most specifically repressed anger (which you may be even unaware off) by creating physical pain by creating oxygen deprevation in some nerves (which is totally harmless like a cramp but feels like the end of the world to you).
So the pain is real and measurable even though harmless. Regardless, this creates fear and you start believing that the problem in your disc bulge, herniation, etc which is causing it. This is my own interpretation but it's the fear of pain more than pain that makes it into a debilitating pain.
Once you add all the advice on sitting like this and standing like that and getting into the car like this plus problems from your MRI, X Ray and more and more things you are doing wrong, you start believing there is something actually very wrong with you. Yet is not the cause of it but just your repressed emotions.
So long story short as soon as you start believing your body is fine and it your emotions causing the pain, the pain loses its purpose and goes away (that's why people who have been struggling for years get better in 2 to 3 weeks).
The best part is you don't even have to fix the emotions, Just knowing your issue is not structural will make you better.
The method is just to realize that the pain isn't due to any structural abnormality but rather due to suppressed emotions. I think the easiest way to learn more about it is to watch Dr. John Sarno's lecture on YouTube (its about 50 mins long and quite easy to grasp at 2X speeds)
"Food of the Gods" by Terrence McKenna was a revelation and led me to dive into his other books and lectures (and many topics spawned from it). Complete shift in baseline perception. Though not his quote, he said it frequently: "The truth is not only stranger than you suppose, it is stranger than you _can_ suppose."
224 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadPersonally, A Farewell to Arms has likely caused the biggest change. I became really absorbed in the book and at the same time in life was expecting my first child. I didn’t know the story at all, and was not expecting the ending in the least.
There have been many things in life that have taught me to enjoy what I have because it can all be gone in an instant. But that book combined with where I was in life cemented the lesson.
I’m interested in how Man’s Search caused a change in your life.
Always been a favorite.
Your life changes when you read many books from many authors.
[1] https://YouTu.be/Fvhb4WqJ7pg
https://boingboing.net/2015/12/21/a-survivalist-on-why-you-s...
http://raymondfrancisauthor.com/
When young and before I knew better, I had two surgeries that should not have been done. Or, for one, not executed in the manner it was; and it was only necessary because of an unavoidable gap in insurance coverage.
Ha, when I remind myself, the other was necessary because of a string of failures initially culminating in an incompetent doctor and the PT he lauded. Then compounded a year later by a surgeon who'd rather operate than image and then was quite lackadaisical about recovery.
Beyond the topic of doctors, we have so much sugar in our diet, in good part because ADM needs to move corn products for profit. I imagine they've now cornered the market on beet sugar, as well, although I don't know. And the cane sugar growers who continue to lobby very effectively e.g. with the leverage of Florida state and its political influence.
"Modern medicine" is very limited in what it can actually, thoroughly fix. Staying healthy is the bulwark, but with a lot of financially motivated people poking holes in this for their own benefit.
It's like a health book that reveals eating more vegetables and whole grains, and getting more exercise is the way to better health. That's useful info, but the hard part is motivating yourself to eat such and exercise often enough.
The hobbit - came with the adventure game that my aunty had on her c64 got me into computers and reading aged about 7
Fear - Thich nhat hahn, read repeatably during recent hard times. Might need to re-read again soon...
I met Thich Nhat Hanh in 2005. It's a meeting that changed my life. I've been rereading The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching since then.
Deep Work gave me some good insight on how to get the most out of my days.
Sapiens vastly widened and shifted my understanding of the myths that make up our society.
For example, WP Curve was even able to automate the process of hiring dozens of developers. You would've that that it would require a very manual intervention by the owner: https://wpcurve.com/hiring-developers/
Where does the actual advice start? This book is recommended pretty much every time someone asks a similar question, I might be willing to give it another shot if there's actual content somewhere in it.
Also, did this guy create a successful business outside of his self-help stuff before he started writing these books?
Prior to reading the book, I had a retire-early mindset. My idea was to work hard at high paying jobs and save a lot so I could retire early. After reading the book, I had the idea to create multiple streams of income in order to achieve the goal of retiring early.
Others have mentioned that it's not easy to find a lifestyle business that earns you enough income to live off of, and I've also had that problem. However, I've had partial success. I don't think I'd have ever pursued this path without reading 4HWW. It's not an instruction manual, though.
If you start hiring full time workers, then your business has to scale a lot. Like revenue has to go to 500-1M range so you have enough to pay full time workers as well as money for yourself. That's just a completely different beast.
For me I hired a few remote part-timers around the world. So it costs me an order of magnitude less. And they're all awesome, so I barely have to lift a finger.
I think part of the reason I'll never have a great deal of money is that the idea of tricking someone into buying a useless product makes me uncomfortable. As does adding more plastic and trash into the world.
What kind of company did you start?
I would not do a lot different but as you ask; I would have started real business networking far sooner. I am a tech guy and always surrounded myself with business guys so I would not have to. I think that was not so smart. I always thought I would be bad at it, but it just is not very hard. And with the right contacts, you can grow and achieve things much faster.
I've never been able to get a successful low-maintenance business going, what kind of business did you start?
I have a SaaS. I have a support person, product manager, and developer. Between them they handle 90% of the day to day tasks.
Runner-up would be `the end of religion` by Bruxy Cavey.
After reading about it, I've learned a lot more about sleep, but the greatest effect is that I really appreciate sleep more, make lots of time to optimize length and quality. Knowing all the info in the book it would be difficult to justify using an alarm clock to force yourself to rise before your body is ready.
Really cool book.
I still don't understand sleep, but, Walker breaks down sleeps benefits & shows the data to back up why we should be getting a full night's rest. He has given me a newfound respect for something I wantonly would throw away at my next personal whim. Silly me, it's been working against me the whole time.
Fewer late nights learning to code, and I'm making much better progress already in the memory department.
As for Cavey's book: Cavey takes a really interesting look at Jesus through a historical lens, coupled with all these little things I had missed in my own reading of the New Testament. It's full of goodies, and is one of those books I've got 20 copies of in my library to hand out like candy.
I was not especially religious, or especially anything until that book convinced me that skepticism was a useful default setting.
To give you a background I have struggled with back pain all my life. After dozens of MRIs, X rays, physiotherapy, ayurveda, yoga, posture exercises, and spending almost 100,000 in the last 15 years on this, a simple book saved me.
The effect was so powerful that I could feel the symptoms fading while I was reading it. It gave me my life back. A few weeks ago I finally had the courage to teach my little one to walk without worrying about bending my back.
Now I feel that more people suffering from back pain, chronic fatigue, etc should be made aware of it. Here is a intro video about it [1]
P.S. I credit hacker news for the source.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vsR4wydiIBI
[1] https://clyp.it/chqx0dku#
People with multiple herniated discs, "pinched nerves", etc never have back pain yet people with no structural abnormality suffer from paralyzing pains.
The reason is your mind. The logic being your brain tries to hide difficult emotions aka stress and most specifically repressed anger (which you may be even unaware off) by creating physical pain by creating oxygen deprevation in some nerves (which is totally harmless like a cramp but feels like the end of the world to you).
So the pain is real and measurable even though harmless. Regardless, this creates fear and you start believing that the problem in your disc bulge, herniation, etc which is causing it. This is my own interpretation but it's the fear of pain more than pain that makes it into a debilitating pain.
Once you add all the advice on sitting like this and standing like that and getting into the car like this plus problems from your MRI, X Ray and more and more things you are doing wrong, you start believing there is something actually very wrong with you. Yet is not the cause of it but just your repressed emotions.
So long story short as soon as you start believing your body is fine and it your emotions causing the pain, the pain loses its purpose and goes away (that's why people who have been struggling for years get better in 2 to 3 weeks).
The best part is you don't even have to fix the emotions, Just knowing your issue is not structural will make you better.
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPV-UbSH3KU
Here's Dr.Sarno's words at the end of movie trailer: 'All this because of one simple idea — that the mind and the body intimately connected'
also, the official website http://alltheragedoc.com/