Books that have affected you and your life the most
I would love to hear what are some of the books that have significantly affected your life and why.
For me they are
Thinking fast and slow: This book helped me realize how to make sense of statistics that are usually cited in media and how to think critically about them and how to think about probability.
The power of habit: this book has helped me understand the habit framework and helped me curb some unwanted habits and helped establish some useful ones.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 72.8 ms ] threadFlow: Psychology of optimal experience - If you want do double down the concept of Flow (situations where you are so involved that you forgot to eat for the whole day (programming in my case)), how to achieve these situations, and how they work.
The lessions of history - This book is just a mine of great golden nugget thoughts.
Slight Edge - Stop looking for easy paths, for quantum leaps. Yes, this is hard, this is a slow path. But you need to follow it to achieve what you want from life. But do it wisely.
Thinking fast and slow and The power of habbit are also great :) Here you can find more of my favorite books: https://stasbar.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl#Controversy
Early books: Arrow to the Sun and Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen and The Hobbit - all very stimulating to imagination.
"Yoga Vasistha" has nothing to do with the physical aspects of Yoga i.e. Asanas (though some passages do talk about them) but deals purely with the internal/intellectual aspects of the mind. It is a very long book with lots of Allegories/Similes/Stories/Repetition and so you have to read it slowly and with patience.
I recommend reading "The Concise Yoga Vasistha" (an abridged version) before reading the unabridged "Vasistha's Yoga" both translated by Swami Venkatesananda.
The book details the lessons over time that the author (an American chess prodigy) learned about how to improve at chess. It gets interesting when he applies these same lessons to become a world champion at combat Tai Chi.
The impact this had on me is how I apply myself to any competitive discipline to maximize learning. Not necessarily success, but the amount of knowledge gained from practice. This has the happy side effect of often leading to success.
But also I liked the stories of a child growing up in a competitive world, the amount of love and support he receives from his mentors, friends, and family. The ability to share this love with other students of chess and to produce profound insight into how people in general learn and react to hypercompetitive situations.
What is also great about the book is that it written in very accessible language. The reader does not need to be a scholar to understand the concepts Waitzkin is trying to express in his book.
How to become a hacker -- not actually a book, but helped build my belief.
The mythical man-month -- this tells me to never take software project time planning seriously because it won't be accurate no matter how confident people are.
Some of my favorites:
- Moby Dick. Probably the single greatest work of American literature, in my opinion of course.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche. An excellent primer to his thought. Any of his books are worth reading, though.
- The Ego and Its Own, Stirner. An under-appreciated philosopher who can really shake up your foundations.
- Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges. His favorite short story of mine. It serves as a very effective metaphor for the power of fiction.
- Anything by Joseph Conrad, although I particularly recommend The Secret Sharer.
Peak: Secrets of the New Science of Learning (changed the way I approach all learning, big compounding effect)
- JCIP "Java Concurrency In Practice" changed my mental model of programming.
- Practical Vim, this was my Eureka moment with vim
- Wait But Why, gave me a diverse perspective on a wide range of things
Why we sleep - changed my perception of sleep. I used to sleep the least I could get away with. Not anymore, I stand corrected by science.
Nonfiction: "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The best book on how to communicate. The best part: the book is written in a way that its content sticks to your memory for a very long time thus proving what it preaches.
- Letters of a Businessman to His Son Paperback - G. Kingsley Ward (Author)
- The Design of the UNIX Operating System
- Horse Sense
- Hemingway farewell to arms
- Save your marriage
- The Essays of Warren Buffett : Lessons for Corporate America
- On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors: John Z. DeLorean's - made me never want to work for big company
1000s of books... no time to read or list them all.