Can't Hurt Me - David Goggins
Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
241–250 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#242War and peace by Tolstoi. It made me aware that someone as successful and powerful as Napoleon himself was by a large extent only a product of the people and the mood at the time. What I mean is that it wasn't him who inspired the people; it rather was just the Zeitgeist he was the perfect person for. I'm not a native speaker and can't really put it into words, but it completely changed my view of the amount of influ…
War and Peace came immediately to mind for me as well, but mostly because I do not think I have ever read a more magnificent novel.
I'm a literature professor, and in academic literary study, we don't spend a lot of time talking about which books are "better" than others. But personally? I'll just never get over that one.
I suppose I'd have to add Aeschylus' The Oresteia (the oldest of the ancient Greek tragedies we possess, and the only complete trilogy). I was a truly terrible high school student, who I think just barely got into college. Reading The Oresteia as a freshman made me decide that one way or another, I would have to figure out how to read and study literature for the rest of my life.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#243"Debt: The first 5000 years" completely changed the way I view money, society, and relationships. "The selfish gene" changed the way I define life, opened my eyes to virtual life, and morality of selfishness vs. altruism. "Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life" changed the way I view the life and material existence. Whereas before I viewed them as two separate domains, after I see them as a spectrum. C…
My pick is "Tao of Pooh," which is kind of a westerner's ELI5 of Taoism. I can't overemphasize how useful Taoism has been for me as a lens through which to understand and participate in the world. (And there really isn't much mysticism to it)
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#244Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae.
The first chapter especially blew my socks off. I never have been able to see nature and man's relation to it in the same way after that.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#245[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#246Factfulness by Hans Rosling - it tells you about our world with actual numbers.
I can't believe how far down the page I had to scroll to find this.
Absolutely opened my eyes to the realities of the world we live in.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#247Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" - it changed how I approach teamwork and conversations. It made me aware of how my behaviour was limiting outcomes. :) Frankly, it made me aware that I was being an asshole and that I should change. However, it wasn't necessarily the book, but the course that I found really useful.
I read that book. It definitely changed how I look at people. It also made me a lot more cynical. I realized around halfway through that the author was (very skillfully) deploying his techniques in the direction of the reader. Further, the author is long-dead. We cannot possibly have a genuine emotional connection. This helped me understand that genuine empathy is irrelevant. All that matters to convincing people is…
It’s been my experience that people can tell genuine empathy from fake.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#2481) "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch - This book allowed me to embrace a sort of rational optimism in my world view. Also I was convinced by this book that the true test of a good government is not about whether you can pick the right leaders every time, but about being able to remove the bad ones relatively quickly.
2.) Candide by Voltaire - contributed to my personal sense of humor and belief that we live in neither the best nor worst of all possible worlds, but simply the most absurd of them.
3) The Art of War by Sun Tzu - Helped me understand the power of small effeciencies in large systems and the importance of metagaming.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#249I imagine I’ll take heat for this, but the first answer that comes to mind is A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari. It has been justifiably criticized by many people on many grounds, but as with OP and Freakonomics, certain of the concepts in that book frequently appear in my thoughts 20 years after I worked through some of it. I don’t associate it with truth; but some of the mental models have really stuck with…
What's an example of a concept from A Thousand Plateaus that has stuck with you?
Rhizomatic values and actions vs arborescent ones, de- and reterritorialization, the drawing of lines of flight, and nomadic war machines, more than anything else. I’m not sufficiently grounded in Marx or Freud to follow their narratives confidently, so my interpretations are probably overly simplistic; but I think they’d have approved of my taking the words and making them my own.
More than any of those individual terms though, I took from the book a sort of gestalt of expansive, additive, richly intellectual ideation, one based not on truth values, but in thinking new thoughts. In my edition, the translator’s introduction portrays D&G’s notion of a concept as a brick that should not be used to build a courthouse, but to be thrown through a window. This whole way of being in the world was enormously refreshing to me when I read it.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#250rich dad poor dad - changed how I think about money.