Ask HN: What's one book that changed your life?

Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall.

It helped me better detect and understand seemingly hypocritical and self-defeating actions by middle managers in companies, and also a lot of the disingenuous emphasis on “passion” used to suppress wages in start-ups or sell job candidates on a reduced salary or equity package with poor expected value or risk characteristics.

I wouldn’t say anything from Moral Mazes was surprising when stepping back to think about known manipulative behavior of middle and upper management. But it did give an excellent analytical and even a normative philosophical framework to use for recognizing and diagnosing it, which sometimes helps for avoiding it, choosing your battles, or knowing when to quit or turn down job offers.

The Poker Face of Wall Street by Aaron Brown

Tied together a lot of concepts from my undergrad with my new work, and on top of it also Poker, which became one of my main analogies for life.

Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

This book called Mindfulness[1], was gifted to me, is very short and easy to read, it has nothing to do about spirituality (which I though it was), and has real life and practical examples. So because it changed my view then I could benefit from a lot of other good materials and talks that before this book I'd not even consider. Long term it also gave me a rational reason to meditate.

I think the saying "the master appears when the student is ready" kind of applies to books, it the depends the moment of your life the book will tell you something or not.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-25th-anniversary-Merloyd-...

I refer to my handwritten notes on this all the time, and seemingly no matter how consistently I apply the ideas in my dealings with others, I always have a feeling that I wish I was doing better at it.