Ask HN: Are there any books that changed your life during college or school?
Life changing is open to your interpretation. It can be anything like changing majors to arriving at some serious realization. In short, it caused a tremendous mind shift that led you to take certain decisions that helped you in the long run.
Any reason for which you still remember that book or its contents. Also mention the reason.
100 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadA few others:
The Simple Path to Wealth - JL Collins (changed my entire investment strategy)
Breath - James Nestor (something so routine but there is so much to learn)
A Short History of Everything - Bill Bryson (silly, but its a pretty large and encompassing look at various parts of life from the galaxy to the planet to cells)
I read it more when I was around 38 or so, but it really helped me change how I interacted with people.
While it's ostensibly a book about sales, I took it as breaking down selling into the idea that if you get along with people and they like you, they will want to work with you. That can take the form of making more sales, but I took it as having people want to do more with you and be around you more.
And how does that happen? Kinda simple: be nice to people, be genuinely interested in them (even if their interests aren't your core ones, they still are often curious), and genuinely try to get to know people.
I took this as a great life lesson for making friends and getting along better with the whole world. And from that flows nice things. And if it's what you need/want, more sales. But it doesn't have to be about sales.
So I figured it must be worth a try and learned a few valuable lessons, even though some of them seem kind of obvious - with the benefit of hindsight.
> even though some of them seem kind of obvious
It may be obvious to you… but believe it or not, there are people who have never seen these things spelled out in plain language and who never discovered these lessons on their own. Such people are not to be disregarded, we all have different strengths and weaknesses.
I’ve not seen another book that really spells out how to make friends and keep them. Everyone is supposed to learn this in Kindergarten, but many do not.
The book is almost 100 years old. Some of the examples have not aged well unless you can be generous in your understanding of the times in which it was written. The examples are still very useful.
Indeed, good points well made, what I meant was that I have been such a person and have been guilty of failings that, when I look back, should have been obvious at the time but were not, for whatever reason.
It's a truly sad comment on our society that so many people have to be taught to do this and effectively be bribed to do it (the bribe being in the form of getting friends and success) instead of it coming naturally.
I also question how "genuine" such interest is, when it's done by people looking for a success/friendship payoff. It seems more manipulative than anything to me.
/me putting it next to my bed, for a rereading.
It changed how I viewed social interactions and made me realise it’s just another skill you can work at, with guidance even.
First time i've seen and experienced the power of abstraction in programming.
This one was right when he was just on the edge of being overly impressed with himself, so the lessons include more humility and less lecturing. His later books still have useful material but the delivery and underlying smugness is jarring.
In short, it's a book you can get a lot from without liking or agreeing with Scott Adams on most of his public opinions.
I don't want to start a theological flame war here but I think it's extremely unfortunate that the Dispensationalist's view of Revelation is the face of North American Protestantism. It's a rather new theology (mid 1800's) but I think it's what most non Christians, that have more than a passing interest in such matters, ascribe to the faith. For those of us who don't subscribe to this theology, the events predicted in Revelation already happened in 70 A.D.
As a Christian, I believe there is always something to be learned from the Holy Scriptures and that the words themselves have significance beyond just letters on a page. The apostle John started his gospel with these words: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." I take this quite literally.
How has the Bible changed my life? I believe the commitment to Christ's teachings and the seeking of the Holy Spirit's counsel is the primary reason I've been happily married for 25 years and have been blessed with two sons that have grown into very lovable and capable young men themselves. Obviously it's not all been a bed of roses, marriage and life is hard at times. But the teachings, hope and promise provide by Christ Jesus has assisted me immensely in navigating life's hurdles.
Read it in my first semester as a freshman Biochem major in college with a great grad student as the teacher of a class on American Lit. Really changed how I thought about books and how I approached writing.
The class was incredibly challenging. I stopped going to my chemistry classes and changed my major to English/Creative Writing.
That was 20 years ago and things have worked out OK. I’m sure I’m happier now (business management career) than I would be in a scientific field.
Turns out it’s only $2.99 on Kindle right now. That’s inspiration enough to give it another read :)
normally, if you disturb a system three things can happen, it can be stable, it can explode, or it can oscillate. corresponding to e^x where x is a complex number or a matrix.
but actually in the liminal area at the edge of cyclical behavior there is a mode that is neither cyclical nor stable and it happens quite a bit and is responsible for many interesting and important phenomena and systems.
there isn't much regularity, the only way to predict is a model of the evolution of the whole system which is highly sensitive to small disturbances or measurement errors.
His biases are clear, but even if you disagree with him, looking past those there is still the very important lesson that much of what we take for granted as true about the world is really not much more than shared mythology, not some objective, universal truth.
So regardless of what you think about his particular viewpoint I think that’s an important lesson that helps you examine the world and assumptions we all make more critically.
If there is such a thing as a “red pill” moment, that book was it for me. After reading it there were many things about our culture that I just couldn’t take seriously anymore.
The reason it changed me? I like starting with a blank slate for new projects without relying on huge monolithic frameworks. Such a book is invaluable for software engineers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind%2C_Beginner's_Mind
I don't think until that point I had really understood the idea of accelerating progress, like I knew that I wanted to work in technology just out of interest, but that book really instilled in me that the pace of change could be really quite rapid through my career, which to me made it all the more exciting. Certainly in my career in software so far that's turned out to be the case.
This was a good alternative view to how we were taught the world was “meant” to be run
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Trap
I’ve read it when I was in my late teens / early twenties and it sort of changed my outlook on things. My then very naive and straightforward view of the world where right and wrong are obvious was shattered. It’s kind of made me sad and that sadness has remained with me ever since.
Since that time it’s been my answer to a question about a book that has had the most impact on me.
I read it while starting a company, and it was exactly what I needed to suffer that process.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
I'm not a huge fan of the book, but for me it was a viewpoint often missing now days. For some people it's a good wake up call. If one want to trade in some of our sicker tendencies in this society for better virtues then perhaps it may be appropriate.
The book is also an easy read because the entire thing is told in the form of a father-son travelogue. The fact that the author pulled off a travelogue about the philosophy of science is an amazing feat of exposition. So another lesson is about the value of good communication.
1. Simplicity, William Jensen 2. Getting Things Done (GTD) 3. Getting Real, Jason Fried
The main character gets an A.I. powered book that teaches them anything. pretty mind blowing for me, I imagine one day possibly something like that could exist.