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What is a book that left an impression on you?
What is your number 1 recommended book? That one book that left an impression on you and that you recommend to people?
What is your number 1 recommended book? That one book that left an impression on you and that you recommend to people?
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. It got me to completely rethink about habits and essentially changed my life. Once I understood habits (and how to form them) better, I became much more disciplined. Because I became much more disciplined, I've been able to read more books, study Korean and programming diligently, and finish more projects.
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham (who mentored Warren Buffett) is also a good read, and surprisingly accessible.
Korea's Place in the Sun by Bruce Cummings made me realize
I can't speak for the UK/Turkey ones, but I don't recall the US adopting the current flag specifically for wartime, as it was always used during both peace and wartime. The Rising Sun flag may have had other history, but it was specifically adopted as the official wartime flag in 1870, and as the official ensign of the navy [0]. It was under this flag, that Japan committed atrocities to the extent that when people see that flag, rarely do they think of the original usage in the 1600s.
Especially in Korea, this flag is associated with Japanese imperialism and colonialism, and is highly offensive to this day. Issues still arise because of it [1].
Turkey/UK may have a similar story, but that is whataboutism. I'm specifically discussing Korean/Japanese/East Asian history here and how it's not really understood well in the US.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_Flag
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-japan-flag/japan-to-skip-naval-event-after-south-korea-protests-over-rising-sun-flag-idUSKCN1MF0D7
I have started reading the power of habit but stopped midway through, can't remember why. I will pick it up again, I remember I was enjoying it. Thank you!
No problem. As I recall, the core concepts are presented really early on, and the rest of the book is examples of it in action / personal stories, etc. It has been a while since I've read it though, so take that with a grain of salt.
Could you offer a couple of the key points presented that have most benefited you in terms of positive habit forming?
The hardest part of a brand new habit is at first. Think of driving or some other skill you had to learn. At first it was probably nerve wracking or completely alien, but you had to push through it. Now I don't even register driving at all, other than that it's something I do to get from point a to point b. This is why so many people fail at working out, because it's simply so much information to learn and retain before you do it enough that you slip into autopilot mode. In certain habits it's beneficial to have a friend who can guide you and keep you motivated.
The biggest factor for me, in terms of retaining a new habit, was learning to make sure I always got reminded of it somehow. E.g. if one is trying to start running, then make sure you can see your running shoes when you wake up / whenever you usually have time to run.
Breaking large goals into actionable, small items is extremely important. Couch to 5k is a good example of this, but it applies to any habit. If you don't focus on small goals that you can complete and get a "success" sensation, the frustration will outweigh it eventually. Don't say "I want to read a book". Say "today, whether I like it or not, I am reading 30 pages at least".
The book also uses the story of febreze not really landing with people at first, because there wasn't a distinct, noticeable effect. But it did land once they added that distinct febreze "clean" smell, which gives a noticeable effect that one did (or hasn't done) the cleaning. I don't know if it's actually true or not but it makes complete sense to me. Having reminders through an effect / lack of an effect helps as well.
Seeing how habits get formed also helps one prevent forming negative habits–i.e. eating too many times at a restaurant that's on the way home from work. Left unchecked, one might slip into going there without even thinking after a while. This started to happen to me recently as I would often stop by a convenience store in the train station I take to get home. Now I just muscle my will into not stopping there.
Changing one's location (even temporarily) also can make/break habits. I got myself into doing about ~30-60 pushups nightly (up from none) until I went on a cross country trip in the US. I just kinda stopped because it felt weird doing that right in front of my family. Since then I just have not really prioritized it.
Lastly, none of this matters if you don't have your priorities in order. You need to figure out what you actually want, not what you would like to obtain without putting in the effort. Don't ever say: "oh, I wish I could play the piano"–if you really wanted that, you would be doing it already. Recognize that you want certain goals in the limited time you have between work, social life, eating, and sleeping.
It's been so long since I've read the book that this advice is mixed among the book, my personal experiences and growth, and advice from super driven people like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Anyone considering The Power of Habit might also want to look into Atomic Habits by James Clear. https://smile.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299
Yes. Both are great, but Atomic Habits worked better for me. Really well structured book.
I don't know that its something I would randomly suggest today as a book, since I assume most people have read it.
The Hobbit - This got me truly interested in reading. I didn't know books could have such fully realized worlds. I always had trouble imagining things, but this book kind of opened up a lot of interests and hobbies I'd have later in life.
I think The Hobbit is a great gateway into the wider world of fantasy literature and interests. It hasn’t kept its popularity all these years for no reason, after all!
I came across C.S Lewis before Tolkien when I was younger and, when I became older, wasn’t surprised in the least when I found out the two were friends and writing colleagues. Both do such a wonderful job of, like you said, opening up interests and hobbies with the worlds they created.
I love The Hobbit, but I also share Tolkien's own opinion that El Hobbit was too childish. I think it's the perfect book to introduce young readers to the fantasy genre but I don't think it's a good entry point for an adult, especially as many adults still have a concept of fantasy as a genre for children. It's a great book, I recommend it, but I wanted to make it clear that it's more childish than the rest of the books set in Middle-earth.
But those are two totally different things. The books that left an impression on me are generally not the books I recommend to people, because what makes an impression on someone is extremely personal and subjective, and there's no guarantee that what impressed me would impress someone else. My recommendations are based more around other people's interests than my personal subjective responses to a book.
So I'm not really sure what you want from me. Do you want me to recommend you a book? If so, I'd need know what you're interested in, so I can see if I know of any books in those areas of interest. Do you want me to tell you about a book that made an impression on me? If so, I need to make the disclaimer that I'm not recommending this book to you, because I have no idea if it would be of any interest to you whatsoever.
I'll go with a book that made an impression on me (which, as I just explained, is not necessarily the same as a book I would recommend other people to read).
There have been a few books which made long-lasting impressions on me, for various reasons: Isaac Asimov's autobiography 'I, Asimov'; Colleen McCullough's historical fiction 'The First Man in Rome'; Peter Singer's ethics polemic 'How Are We To Live?'; A.C. Grayling's philosophy study 'The God Argument'.
However, there is one section of one book which always sits in the back of my mind, and actually influenced how I think about certain things, and has even changed my behaviour to a degree.
It's Chapter 12 of the 1989 revised edition of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, entitled "Nice guys finish first". This is one of the two chapters that Dawkins added for this revised edition. It's about the Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a famous game used in game theory. In the game, each player chooses to cooperate or defect (without communicating with the other player!), and both players are rewarded or punished depending on the interaction of both players' decisions. The rewards and punishments are arranged in such a way that both players get punished if both players defect, both players get rewarded if both players cooperate, but a player gets the highest possible reward if they defect while the other player cooperates. In particular, "Nice guys finish first" is about an iterated version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, where two players keep playing the game repeatedly with each other - and can use their memory of prior rounds to influence their decision in future rounds.
In this chapter, Dawkins describes a computer programming tournament based on the Prisoner's Dilemma, where programmers were invited to create programs which would play the iterated game against other programs. Each program had its own strategy. Some were cooperative, some were non-cooperative, some were nice, some were nasty, and so on. The challenge was to devise a strategy that would win most consistently against all other strategies. The organiser paired each program with all other programs in a round-robin format, played them against each other repeatedly, and determined which program gained the most rewards overall.
Surprisingly, the most successful program was nice and forgiving. It was called Tit For Tat. It started out by cooperating as its default choice. As long as the program it was paired with cooperated, Tit For Tat kept cooperating. If the other program defected in one game, Tit For Tat would defect in the next game, but only that one time, before reverting to cooperating in the game after that, until the other program defected again, in which case Tit For Tat would defect in the next game, and then again revert to cooperating in the game after that, and so on.
This strategy consistently achieved the most rewards against all other strategies, even the nastiest, most defection-oriented strategies. They even ran the tournament a second time, and invited more programmers to submit more programs - and Tit For Tat won again.
Tit For Tat never did the wrong thing first, always punished another program for doing the wrong thing, but always forgave the other program if it stopped doing the wrong thing.
That made an impression on me. That has influenced how I deal with other people.
By the way... if you're interested in doing this exercise for yourself, there's something very similar called The Game of Trust (thanks to @Amarok for introducing me to this!). You can prove for yourself that being nice and forgiving is a winning strategy. (The Tit For Tat strategy is called Copycat in The Game of Trust.)
The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
The first part discribes the living conditions of working class people in the thirties, especially of coal miners. It's interesting and horrifying at the same time. The second part is much more essay like and deals with socialism and inherent class barriers. As a sheltered, twenty year old programmer who always idealised the working class life without knowing much about it, the book was pretty eye opening.
Any chance you’re a fan of Jordan Peterson?
I know Orwell is immensely popular but that book is on Peterson’s reading list IIRC.
Peterson also discusses class barriers and how we can potentially reconcile issues with them.
Where exactly does he discuss this? Can you link something?
Taking Peterson's communications altogether, he's broadly a conservative with 'up by your own bootstraps' type personal responsibility rhetoric. Socialist class conflict rhetoric certainly doesn't seem his thing.
I'm sorry, I don't have any direct links right now ( convenient of me, I know) but mainly through lines of free speech and having the hard conversations rather than shying away, we can find new ways to agree and help each other.
Perhaps I may be interpreting his commentary on RTWP, but wasn't it a criticism of the way the Socialist idealogy was leaving some in absolutely derilect conditions?
That just sounds like utter pablum to me. Peterson is all about Hard Conversations™, but gets very tetchy about protest, as if protest hasn't been a critical part of recent advancements in human society like women's suffrage and civil rights.
What's RTWP? I'm not familiar with that criticism but it wouldn't surprise me to hear Peterson making that sort of criticism, as he's very regularly straw-manning socialism and getting key factual details wrong.
He's a Jungian Psych guy, with a penchant for self-help. Anytime he gets political or philosophical he's bad.
Heard of him but didn't know his connection to the book. I found out about the book after reading several Orwell essays online (and 1984 of course)
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson. It struck me with this new idea of how I want to live my life.
I was raised in a restrictive, highly-protective environment, and despite high ambitions, I never developed anything or into anything for a long time. It took studying at a university far away from home to get a sense of what I am, what I want to be, and what is it that drives me.
The Subtle Art... was the catalyst of a lot of self-discovery, partly because Mark expresses well the same attitude towards life that I never realized I always had: that not only is it worth living, it's worth living to a higher standard; not settling for something just because it's available, searching for something better than is readily available, getting shit done because you're passionate about it...
I noticed about myself that it takes hearing about something being done to be "permitted" to do the same. I'm creative and open-minded, but also cautious and risk-averse. Whenever I'm about to do something that isn't "normal", "usual", or "common", I'd get chills from "not doing the right thing". Seeing others do what inspires me drives me to do the same, because someone else could.
Mark's book – and blog – was that for me. I've read the book over a long time – only when travelling long distances, which wasn't often – which may have yielded the benefit of the ideas settling in, creating a more fertile ground for the rest of them.
Because of the book, I left uni at the end of my third year, realizing I can't do this shit anymore (education was fantastic, but there was a lot of overhead, maintaining which was more pain than it was worth). Now, I'm writing, designing, and coding my way into making my own living with the talents, knacks, and passions I have readily available.
The Famished Road by Ben Okri. It's quite possibly the most beautifully written thing I've ever read.
And The Book Of Dave by Will Self is a rollicking good yarn and a bit of a dig at belief systems. I really enjoy Will Self's writing and recommend trying it if you haven't read anything of his.
Yeah I read Great Apes a while ago and that was an interesting read. I would recommend Will Self too.
Most recently this has been Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. It drove home the importance of sleep for me (which I kind of recognized on the surface but never really internalized until now) and made me change my sleep habits. I was chronically sleep deprived for years and didn't realize just how worn down I was until I started getting a consistent 7-8 hours per night.
I didn't read the book but I saw him on Joe Rogan and was fascinated. Very carismatic guy. I've also tried to improve my sleep since then.
I will start.
I read "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain", by John Ratey a few years back and even before finishing the book I spent a huge chunk of my available money on a bike.
Depends on what the inquirer is looking for honestly; If i had to name the book i enjoyed reading the most it would be for sure Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. In the end of things it's just a thriller (albeit an exceptional one) so don't expect anything lifechanging, what it will do for damn sure is keep you glued til the very last page.
East of Eden by Steinbeck. I think Steinbeck does a really good job of writing characters that do good things and bad things without being preachy about his own personal values. EoE in particular leaves one with a sense that one can always decide to try to be better. It's also a very good story with all sorts of lessons throughout. If there's one thing that "stuck" with me though, it's that idea of man over destiny.
By far, the book that left the greatest impression on me, and is my favorite, is the Tao Te Ching. I was lucky enough to be first introduced to it via a translation that preserved both its sometimes-inscrutable poetry and the simplicity of its wisdom. I don't necessarily recommend it to everyone, though. It's the kind of book that you read slowly, repeatedly, and let marinate. My most-recommended book would probably be The Simplest Game by Paul Gardner, a rich reflection on the history of soccer and its World Cups.
There’s a book, by Christopher Moore, called Lamb. The book is a satirical (some may say sacrilegious) take on the life of Joshua of Nazareth (Jesus) and his childhood friend, Biff. Though, ultimately, I’d argue the story is more about the bonds of friendship and the things we’ll do for the people we choose to be family.
One of the unexpected side-effects the book left me with was this humanized concept of Jesus that, even as an ardent and “preachy” atheist at the time, I could find myself appreciating. That book, and the themes/concepts it envoked, were more “Christian” in value than any other literature, sermon, or group I’d been expected to be a part of by my community or friends growing up.
I’m agnostic now and I credit some of that shift to the book and the questions it raised.
Ultimately, I don’t expect anyone to have monumental changes in their theological beliefs based off reading the book. But it’s a great story about the bonds that bring us together and one of the reasons I’m comfortable now, as a 30-something year-old man saying out loud to my male best friends that I love them and want them to know that.
"never split the difference" by Chris Voss
I actively avoided negotiation books before this one, and it completely changed my thinking and approach. Empathy for your counterpart can unlock better outcomes for both of you, and sometimes you discover what they really need in the process
The Myth of Sysiphus was probably the only book that has changed me at all. It helped me come to terms with the meaninglessness of life. However, it was also by far the most soul-crushingly-boring book I have ever read, so I don't recommend it all willy-nilly. Also, you don't even need to read the book to get the point of it, since you can really read the Wikipedia page on it and watch a couple of videos on YouTube and you won't be missing much, if anything at all. Most of it was very repetitive. It references many other books from other authors which, if you haven't read them, might be lost on you. I'm at the moment reading those books. Hoping that reading The Myth a second time might be more enjoyable.
Three books:
That first one seems really interesting to put things into perspective, might just be what I need. On top of that, it is a short read, only around 200 pages. I will read it next. Thank you for recommending it.
I hope you like it.
The Book of Strange New Things. The story itself was impactful, but there's something about the story that you should look into after you've read it that makes it so much more meaningful (and is the reason we likely won't be seeing anything further from the author).