It's the oldest text on mindfulness meditation in the buddhist tradition. In all likelihood, they didn't just read it and follow the instructions, as interpreting it's meaning from scratch is the life's work of a buddhist scholar. It doesn't include any of the buddhist moral teaching ("have goodwill towards others") so most likely OP meant that meditation had a positive effect on their life.
> Continual upskilling is critical for accelerating your career progression. However, the time constraint that corporate employment entail tends to spare limited time for you to improve your skillset.
This book is on my night stand I try to read it a couple times a year. I feel like you can’t just read it once. You have to be reminded of its principals constantly.
The millionaire fastlane by MJ de Marco dispite its cliché title is by far one of the best books I've ever read. It shows what it takes to make money by solving other people's problems in a no BS manner.
That book is total bs, probably the worst offender on the list. It’s nothing but just-so anecdotes written by someone who (a) got outrageously lucky and (b) benefits hugely from white privilege.
“Self-made millionaire” is not a thing. If you start from a premise that believes this is a possible concept, you’re just self-deluded selling snake oil.
The Millionaire Fastlane is the same old scam as the rest of them. Its self-aggrandizing author can believe he knows some psychological focus principles that unlock chances of wealth, but it’s just ego/narcissism. He just got lucky, in a cosmic sense (being born white in modern America) and in specific business opportunities. For every one MJ Demarco there are a million people with same mindset, same grit, same determination, same talent, same attitude etc who got nothing. It’s all just plinko.
If y'all gonna hop in this thread with your favorite book it may be more convincing to write something more than just "it changed my life." Apparently Buddhism, stoicism, and the Rust programming language are all equally capable of changing a hackernews poster's life?
If you take out the "equally" and read it more like "all 3 are capable of being being catalysts for dramatic change (presumably good) in someone's life", then I don't see how that's unreasonable. Philosophy books for what I would guess most people would say are obvious reasons; a programming book possibly for teaching a person to think differently about a thing they spend a large percentage of their life doing.
You're not wrong but why would I read a rust book instead of a php one, if I was an English teacher browsing this thread for "self help" book recommendations? That's kinda my point. I don't want to assume why someone liked a book, I'll probably get it wrong.
I’m glad to see Millionaire Fastlane at the top of the list. I make money effortlessly in large part due to the mindset of value creation that this book talks about.
I’m curious if it’s relatable to Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
That changed the way I thought about money very early on by focusing on defining assets purely as things that generate money for you and not “things you own.”
Ex. Your house is not an asset, a house that you rent to a tenant is, etc.
The goal of the book was to reiterate the idea that creating income generating assets will allow you to exit the workforce. No other type of asset defined by other terms would do so.
It had a big focus on real estate or investing in small stable, we’ll establish business models like gas stations, etc but in our field it could easily apply to stable side projects too.
> This book explores scientific facts that imply that the impact of the decision taken is dependent on their timing.
I'm skeptical whenever a self help book talks about "scientific facts" as it relates to psychological research. Especially lately as a lot of psychology experiments are undergoing a crisis of reproducibility. I recall some oft-repeated idea that we have a limited willpower gas tank that is depleted by every decision we make in a day, which was based on a cookie experiment that I read was recently reproduced to show an opposite result.
In any case the use of the word "fact" seems strong but perhaps the book addresses this.
You're holding money to a far higher standard (everyone? all the time?) than any of these self-help techniques are held to. I suspect that's because you know it works better.
If someone is reading 'books on how to get rich' then they're not looking to get mega-yacht wealthy. They're looking for financial security.
This is a well put together video but I wouldn't take as drastic a view. I believe we have something to learn from everyone, it's just knowing what will work for you and what won't while being careful of not entering that cultish mindset. Everything in moderation.
Site is hugged to death, but as usual I won't let that stop me from commenting.
I don't think many lives are changed by self-help books. People who are actively trying to change their lives often read self-help books, and then misattribute any positive result to the book. Then they recommend the book to others, and it's either mindless blather, or common-sense tropes wrapped in a bow, or something that reinforces a decision they've already made. Someone decides they need to focus on something, and then reads a book about it while they're focused on it. They already changed their life before they read the book, by making the decision to change.
No one is changed by a religious text if they are already a religious person who largely agrees with the philosophy. No one changes their diet if they haven't already made a decision to eat healthier. No one GETS.RICH.QUICK if they weren't already entrepreneurial.
Yeah, maybe these books impacted people in some way. But they were already 99% of the way there. Recommending them to someone who isn't also 99% of the way there isn't going to change a thing.
The older I get the more obvious it is that there are no new ideas, there's just new branding.
Now that I can see the site, these are all books by people who through a combination of luck, timing, skill, and work managed to get rich. Now they think they figured out something others didn't. No, they were well-positioned--largely through the circumstances of their birth--got lucky, and then had the skill to take advantage of the combination. Now they think they discovered something. They didn't, and they actually have no awareness of how they ended up where they are.
And the things they did learn can all be boiled down to a blog article. Instead they fleshing out simple ideas to 100 pages of examples and repetition.
I largely agree with your position. Nevertheless I would argue that from time to time one can pick up ideas or concepts which lead to a "click"-like effect in the mind. Which ultimately changes behavior.
But I'm the first to acknowledge that these kind of things are seldom found in such self-help books. Especially not in these get rich kind of stuff. I completely lost interest in this gossip.
I really disagree. I think you haven't even tried reading the article or any of these books. To be true I was one of these people who thought all these "self-help" books are quite useless. I used to hate the word "self-help"
But these books changed my mindset. Let me share some insights from these books:
1) Fastlane Millionaire
Told me that if I want to be a "Millionaire" then it's highly unlikely I will be one by working for others (a job) unless my job is super high paying. Also by having a job I am playing an almost no risk and less reward game. Instead if I just increase the risk profile lil bit my rewards will be must more increased. It's hard to explain everything in 2 lines, hence this books is number 1.
2) Creativity Inc
How can creativity be nurtured and promoted.
3) Range
I am one of those people who like to do multiple things and mostly mix my different passions and make something new.
6) The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau
Startups don't need to be started with a lot of money. People are making it big.
7) Originals by Adam Grant
Lessons from others that it is okay to think differently and it is okay to do things others might tell you not to.
I've only read three self-help books that have dramatically changed my thinking:
* How To Develop Your Thinking Ability by Ken Keyes Jr. It's out of print now, but easy to find a copy. It condenses down a lot of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics into an easy to digest format.
* The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. Also quite an old book, mentions a lot of similar ideas to Psychocybernetics (essentially the queen or king of all self-help books: most other ones just re-iterate the ideas in this one). It discusses how the thinking mind gets in the way of true excellence. I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from entering into meditative jhana.
* Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. While certainly filled with some questionable ideas, this absolutely broke my neat model of objective reality into tiny little pieces in high school. It set off a journey of self-exploration.
While some of the books in this list are good, everyone in silicon valley talks about a lot of those books nonstop. You'll understand the language SV folks use to talk about ideas, but you won't offer much else in the way of a unique perspective. A journey of reading needs to be self-lead.
> I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from entering into meditative jhana.
Can you elaborate on this please? I've read The Inner Game of Tennis and I'm familiar with the (samatha) jhanas (and somewhat experienced as well). Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana, etc?
> Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana?
Yeah, pretty much. It primed me to pay a lot more attention to the judging mind particularly during sits (and really made me aware how much doubt as a hindrance disrupts my practice). While retrospectively it’s sort of obvious, I mainly have learned meditation through reading, so if an instruction isn’t phrased the right way I’ve noticed I miss it.
Thanks. I similarly came up with a heuristic after reading Tor Nørretranders’ book The User Illusion. I remind myself that there is some part of my brain already paying attention constantly to the breath at the tip of the nose (or whatever the current meditation object is) because if a noxious stimulus presented there I would certainly become consciously aware of it. So all I have to do is ‘tune in’ to that part of my awareness. This works pretty well for me, and not surprisingly many meditation instructions use this metaphor of tuning a radio, but it didn’t make as much sense before I began to think of it in this way. I have also learned meditation mainly from reading.
This may be the case for you but these kind of things are very much dependent on the person.
One thing is to accept that not all items on various lists will be finished. The book explicitly says this is the case and recommends to remove items if they have not been done after a few weeks. If one can do this without much or any negative emotion I do not see this downside.
I don’t know how much self help it might be considered, but reading about reinforcement learning was quite a valuable perspective. Now I reflect a bit more on my own value functions and how I can possibly communicate them effectively.
Sure, it's thesis is practicable and generalizable, but it's more of a pop-psych book.
That said, I'd recommend Range as a great book to read on a flight or at the beach (whenever those return). The thesis is pretty easy to grok. The chapters that give examples towards the thesis are entertaining and memorable. The section on the orphan musical geniuses is very good.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadhttps://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
Also
> Continual upskilling is critical for accelerating your career progression. However, the time constraint that corporate employment entail tends to spare limited time for you to improve your skillset.
Who writes like this? "Upskilling?" C'mon
by William Braxton Irvine
“Self-made millionaire” is not a thing. If you start from a premise that believes this is a possible concept, you’re just self-deluded selling snake oil.
The Millionaire Fastlane is the same old scam as the rest of them. Its self-aggrandizing author can believe he knows some psychological focus principles that unlock chances of wealth, but it’s just ego/narcissism. He just got lucky, in a cosmic sense (being born white in modern America) and in specific business opportunities. For every one MJ Demarco there are a million people with same mindset, same grit, same determination, same talent, same attitude etc who got nothing. It’s all just plinko.
Would you like a list of the self-help books that got me to my three commas?
There's limited time in life. A thread like this would be fun if people said a bit about why a certain book is absolutely worth reading...
wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20200712144005/https://dailyjag....
That changed the way I thought about money very early on by focusing on defining assets purely as things that generate money for you and not “things you own.”
Ex. Your house is not an asset, a house that you rent to a tenant is, etc.
The goal of the book was to reiterate the idea that creating income generating assets will allow you to exit the workforce. No other type of asset defined by other terms would do so.
It had a big focus on real estate or investing in small stable, we’ll establish business models like gas stations, etc but in our field it could easily apply to stable side projects too.
Very cash flow oriented.
> This book explores scientific facts that imply that the impact of the decision taken is dependent on their timing.
I'm skeptical whenever a self help book talks about "scientific facts" as it relates to psychological research. Especially lately as a lot of psychology experiments are undergoing a crisis of reproducibility. I recall some oft-repeated idea that we have a limited willpower gas tank that is depleted by every decision we make in a day, which was based on a cookie experiment that I read was recently reproduced to show an opposite result.
In any case the use of the word "fact" seems strong but perhaps the book addresses this.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20200712144005/https://dailyjag.c...
If someone is reading 'books on how to get rich' then they're not looking to get mega-yacht wealthy. They're looking for financial security.
I don't think many lives are changed by self-help books. People who are actively trying to change their lives often read self-help books, and then misattribute any positive result to the book. Then they recommend the book to others, and it's either mindless blather, or common-sense tropes wrapped in a bow, or something that reinforces a decision they've already made. Someone decides they need to focus on something, and then reads a book about it while they're focused on it. They already changed their life before they read the book, by making the decision to change.
No one is changed by a religious text if they are already a religious person who largely agrees with the philosophy. No one changes their diet if they haven't already made a decision to eat healthier. No one GETS.RICH.QUICK if they weren't already entrepreneurial.
Yeah, maybe these books impacted people in some way. But they were already 99% of the way there. Recommending them to someone who isn't also 99% of the way there isn't going to change a thing.
The older I get the more obvious it is that there are no new ideas, there's just new branding.
But I'm the first to acknowledge that these kind of things are seldom found in such self-help books. Especially not in these get rich kind of stuff. I completely lost interest in this gossip.
But these books changed my mindset. Let me share some insights from these books:
1) Fastlane Millionaire Told me that if I want to be a "Millionaire" then it's highly unlikely I will be one by working for others (a job) unless my job is super high paying. Also by having a job I am playing an almost no risk and less reward game. Instead if I just increase the risk profile lil bit my rewards will be must more increased. It's hard to explain everything in 2 lines, hence this books is number 1.
2) Creativity Inc How can creativity be nurtured and promoted.
3) Range I am one of those people who like to do multiple things and mostly mix my different passions and make something new.
6) The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau Startups don't need to be started with a lot of money. People are making it big.
7) Originals by Adam Grant Lessons from others that it is okay to think differently and it is okay to do things others might tell you not to.
These are some lessons I owe to these books.
* How To Develop Your Thinking Ability by Ken Keyes Jr. It's out of print now, but easy to find a copy. It condenses down a lot of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics into an easy to digest format.
* The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. Also quite an old book, mentions a lot of similar ideas to Psychocybernetics (essentially the queen or king of all self-help books: most other ones just re-iterate the ideas in this one). It discusses how the thinking mind gets in the way of true excellence. I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from entering into meditative jhana.
* Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. While certainly filled with some questionable ideas, this absolutely broke my neat model of objective reality into tiny little pieces in high school. It set off a journey of self-exploration.
While some of the books in this list are good, everyone in silicon valley talks about a lot of those books nonstop. You'll understand the language SV folks use to talk about ideas, but you won't offer much else in the way of a unique perspective. A journey of reading needs to be self-lead.
Can you elaborate on this please? I've read The Inner Game of Tennis and I'm familiar with the (samatha) jhanas (and somewhat experienced as well). Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana, etc?
Yeah, pretty much. It primed me to pay a lot more attention to the judging mind particularly during sits (and really made me aware how much doubt as a hindrance disrupts my practice). While retrospectively it’s sort of obvious, I mainly have learned meditation through reading, so if an instruction isn’t phrased the right way I’ve noticed I miss it.
In it, he set out a fairly useful exercise for me, called "The mini-saga" (I don't think he originated the idea).
The goal is to write a story in exactly fifty words (not characters).
It was an enjoyable exercise.
I always like the story that was attributed to Hemingway, that the shortest story ever told was "For sale, baby shoes, never worn."
The path of getting things done leads to nowhere.
One thing is to accept that not all items on various lists will be finished. The book explicitly says this is the case and recommends to remove items if they have not been done after a few weeks. If one can do this without much or any negative emotion I do not see this downside.
Sure, it's thesis is practicable and generalizable, but it's more of a pop-psych book.
That said, I'd recommend Range as a great book to read on a flight or at the beach (whenever those return). The thesis is pretty easy to grok. The chapters that give examples towards the thesis are entertaining and memorable. The section on the orphan musical geniuses is very good.
It's a great book, just not self-help.
P.S. I chose a really bad day to move plugins, update site etc and that's why some of you were seeing the 502 errors. Sorry about that.