Mindset, by Carol Dweck. Highly Recommended. The fact that any skill can be learnt provided you work hard for it really impacted me. Also, it was one of the first books I read, which normalized the importance of hard-work - forever different after reading that book.
Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#312I read Freakonomics and Guns, Germs and Steel in college and was initially 'amazed' by it. Now, I see it as mass market rubbish used to influence a particular demographic. But that goes for pretty much everything really. Catcher in the Rye in high school. Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People". I think books can "change the way you think about almost everything" when you are younger, naive and idealisti…
>mass market rubbish
Yep, that describes so much of what's popular.
One book I find goes in the opposite direction--I didn't get much from it when younger, but when I revisited it as a grown man, I suddenly saw a lot more value in it: The Bible. Which is about as far from "mass market rubbish" as you can get, considering quite a lot of it was written by people who were persecuted, tortured, and killed for writing it!
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#313Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#314Of all the books I read - fiction and non fiction, wonderful ideas in SF and Carl Sagan - I'd have to single out Selfish Gene, as it single-handedly changed my perspective and mental/internal framework of the universe. I struggled philosophically with questions of consciousness and our place & meaning in the universe.
Note that I cannot always wholeheartedly, universally recommend all his later philosophical / atheism books to a wider audience, Selfish Gene is a no-brainer to me. --- Close second is Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#315The Selfish Gene & The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins Evolution is the reason we exist! Understanding how it happens and why it can lead to counterintuitive outcomes is very important. He also narrates his own audiobooks and is excellent at it. The Blank Slate & The Better Angels of our Nature by Pinker Both books counter much accepted wisdom. The second book, in particular, will make you think of humanity in a fundamen…
I was going to suggest a some of those.
Dawkins: A lot of really interesting things in life are really weird and puzzling, such as sex. Literature and religion try to elucidate it, but fail to get to the bottom of it. The insights popularised by Dawkins really make a lot of sense of it.
Pinker: Absolutely. There is this notion that things were much better in the past. These books shred it to pieces. It's also worth looking at Pinker's Enlightenement Now, and Julian Simon's The State of the World, though that has a lot of libertarian propaganda in it. However, the statistics are sound.
Taleb: Not a huge fan of Taleb. The point about the role of chance is much better made, in my view, by Robert H. Frank in his Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#316Antifragile: How to live in a world we don't understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I realized that my bad relationships are mostly the result of my lack of skin in the game. That indifference is not an advantage but that it is paralyzing. That I have to feel to be able to risk and do something. In addition to applying the concept of antifragility to many external things. It has motivated me to start a business and to…
> changed my perspective on research
could you elaborate on that? pro research or against?
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#317Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky
Les Miserables, Hugo
Several stories by Kafka
Dubliners, Joyce
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#318Stephen Covey 7 Habits. Not so much the habits themselves, but rather the ideas presented. Specifically: principle-centered life, character ethic vs. personality ethic, circle of concern and circle of influence, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#319"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari. Hands down the book that most influenced me. The book had (for me) not one but several simple-yet-profound ideas that were forever inserted into the foreground of how I make sense of the world. For example, the existence of shared myths that allow humans to cooperate on a large scale. Or how I too, am religious, though I was sure I wasn't. Can't recommend…
Check out his sequel: https://www.ynharari.com/book/homo-deus/
Absolutely loved this book. Very thought provoking.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#320Guns, Germs and Steel by Diamond. Also Foundation Trilogy by Asimov because of the incredible creativity needed to tell that story
recent HN thread discussed how flawed guns, Germs and Steel is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19034468