Ask HN: What book changed your life in 2013?
The most significant book for me was in the area of health and fitness as I finally read The 4-Hour Body (2010) by Tim Ferris. I'd read about many of the topics he covers before but they just didn't stick until The 4-Hour Body. What I like about Tim's approach is that one should experiment to see what works rather than following a rigid plan. I tried many of his suggestions and some worked for me while others didn't. The binge day was particularly bad so now I just follow the same plan every day; as well I had to increase the amount of carbs before my last meal of the day to get a better sleep. But experimentation and tracking my results has made all the difference from other diet and exercise changes I've attempted in the past. It's definitely worth the read even if experimentation and tracking are the only things you get from the book.
Thanks for a great community and I look forward to your suggestions.
183 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadI had avoided this one for years due to its age and because reading it seemed to imply one has no friends and no influence. It gets long-winded in parts with a few too many examples, but it's excellent. Definitely something everyone should read once, no matter what type of job or lifestyle one leads.
This book profoundly affected me because she convinced me that many of my mannerisms and preferences are completely normal, and even positive. She also confirmed a lot of my suspicions that open offices, group work and the like are not as beneficial as they may seem.
Her TED talk[0] hits most of the major points in her book. If you enjoyed that, her book is a must read.
[0] -- http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts....
Big bulking book, worth every minute you put into it.
I'll choose Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow (http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman-ebo...).
The way it changed my life was to make me actually think more about the way my mind operates, the decisions I make and the way these decisions affect my life. As a consequence, there were a few books I read later that were loosely related to this one in the way that they all refer to the way people think.
Barry Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice
Steven Pinker - How the Mind Works
Nassim Taleb - The Black Swan; and Fooled by Randomness
Leonard Mlodinov - The Drunkard's Walk (quite similar to Fooled by Randomness)
Carol Dweck - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Neil Postman / Andrew Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death
Rolf Dobelli - The Art of Thinking Clearly (just started)
On my reading list now:
Quiet by Susan Cain - mentioned already
The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker
Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday
Also, did not quite change my life, but very recommended:
Neal Stephenson - Anathem.
You may have to struggle through the beginning, but as soon as I understood the way the world he devised operates, I was thrilled completely.
Also, Drunkard's Walk was excellent.
(I started reading Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise when I got to a reference to Thinking, Fast and Slow. Switched and haven't gone back yet.)
The interesting part about Snow Crash is that I feel that the dialogue between Hiro (the protagonist in the story) and the Librarian (an artificial intelligence in the metaverse but more advanced than either Siri or Google Now) amount to what may be the future of Google/Wikipedia/Research in the form of Q&A search queries. His questions are usually ones which attempt to draw new insight from historical documents, but are asked in a way in which the Librarian can answer them as though a computer can, but does not immediately draw conclusions. I can easily see that in 10-20 years, research/Q&A/Google could perform many of those same functions without biasing the user with any particular conclusions (because it can't).
http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...
What struck me about this book is that it's a summary of insights about how to think better from some of the best thinkers ever (Munger to Twain to Einstein to Feynman).
If you're looking for more book recs, Farnam Street (blog dedicated to extracting wisdom from the best of what other people have figured out) is another great resource - http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/
Life changing book. Helped every facet of my life.
The always increasing rate of change in technology, from a close and foreseable future to a not so far away but almost not recognizable one made me rethink how fast are things changing now, and how much they will change pretty soon. Probably we won't get "there", but got the impression that a lot will change the next 1, 5 and 10 years.
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.
All in all, I thought it was pretty modern stuff considering the settings.
I came to realize that sometimes to improve your teams' performance you don't need another tip to add into the behavior of the team members. actually the problem with mature team members is not that they don't know what to do; The problem is that they don't know what to STOP doing. And there is another thing that makes the situation even worse: Most of the time the team member who hurts others in the team don't realize that. But everyone in the room knows that something is wrong as the heat in the room rises. And this heat raise certainly will affect the team overall performance and unity. So this is a serious business.
Very well written and engaging. The prerelease version is available free online at http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000000754. I've known for a long time that I wanted to do unit testing on my web dev projects but never really understood the how part. I'm almost done with the book, and am super excited to try TDD on my projects now.
If you're like me and love debates, this book is awesome. It'll show you how to find common ground and understand implicit values behind arguments.
Link for the lazy (non-affiliate): http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/d...
http://chronicle.com/article/Jonathan-Haidt-Decodes-the/1304...
[1] http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-riddle-of-the-gun [2] http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/faq-on-violence
Also I have now a cleaner desk.
The first changed profoundly how I view myself, the second shows me how I can improve.
Surprisingly (at least to me), the most interesting and profound was an obscure sci-fi book called Permutation City by Greg Egan. It was surprising because it was written in 1994 and pretty much nails HPC and cloud computing. It also plays on the ideas of intelligence, consciousness, artificial life and longevity, all of which I think we're right on the precipice of making some pretty significant inroads within the next decade.
The cloud computing aspect of the novel though really blew me away. Most parts seem almost like throw away paragraphs which help support the plot, but you don't have to squint very hard to see the similarities between it and something like the Amazon Spot Market. For me, in 1994, I couldn't even imagine cloud computing. The PC was so completely dominant at the time (I had a 486DX2-50) and the internet might as well have not existed for most people. The web consisted of a handful of sites and only a few people had even heard of NCSA Mosaic.
I realize others might not find this profound, but for me, working in cloud infrastructure and virtualization, it really struck a chord.
This book by one of his former students and proteges lays it out clearly. Too many people don't really know what strategy is about. The bottom line is that if you have a strategy it should show up in your profits and the examples/case studies of Southwest, Ikea and Zara are really insightful. If you are serious about business or entrepreneurship this book is a must read.
This book has completely changed my view on programming. Also now I appreciate the whole functional paradigm concepts.