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Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
491–500 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#492The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe Food of the Gods - Terence McKenna
Food of the Gods was an amazing read but IMHO the audio lectures of Terence McKenna completely changed the way I look at the world.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#493Antifragile: 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…
I personally found Fooled by Randomness influential - and his later works very much build on the ideas he began with that book.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#494The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias. It inoculated me against a lot of potentially bad financial decisions. Also a fairly quick and entertaining read - which helps in a dry subject like personal finance.
Poland by James Michener - or any other of Michener's historical fiction. Not all of them are great literary works, but because they span thousands of years, they caused me to start thinking generationally.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#495Thinking fast and slow had the biggest impact in changing how I think about a lot of things, epic study of how you’re predisposed to think and make decisions in a particular way. Coincidentally I read it at about the same time as freakonomics!
Would really like a second edition for that book. The replication crisis has, unfortunately not been kind to some of the things in the book.
This keeps me from reading it. Reading something that is wrong but changes the way I view the world is not something I want.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#496"But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past" by Chuck Klosterman was very influential in getting me to step back and question all my assumptions.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#497I am skeptical a single book can change how a person thinks about the world - at least on a practical level. Actually transformative concepts are usually not simple, and they need to mature in the thinkers mind. Most important subjects are ao large it would be impossible to cram them into a single book. Books can be insightfull and amazing, and there are several that are so vivid I find chapters from them popping int…
I think when someone is on the brink of a new understanding and read a book that speaks to the topic in just the right way, it can create major shifts. Though I do think the foundation of that transformation is usually the work of many years of life experience.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#498Probably the two that I find myself thinking back to most often are Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert A. Heinlein), The Phoenix Project (Gene Kim), The Great Shark Hunt (Hunter S Thompson), Several Bukowski short stories and most recently The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake (Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, Evan Bernstein).
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#499The Hero with 1000 Faces, by Joseph Campbell.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#500OK, it might be a bit embarrassing to post this, but I'm going to say Marie Kondo's "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up." Not so much for the tidying part (though I did find that extremely helpful), but the whole idea of only keeping things in your life that "spark joy" (not an exact translation by the way - "spark excitement" or "spark meaning" are other ways I like to think about it) has had a profound impact on…
My wife started watching that Marie Kondo TV show. I came to realize that there are few possessions I own that I would really be upset about losing.
"Only keep it if it sparks joy"? Yeah, just burn the house down, I'm fine.