151–160 of 185 posts
I can't give just one, but here are a few that had a strong influence on me: "12 Rules for Life" by Jordan Peterson, "Why Switzerland?" Jonathan Steinberg, "Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by John C. Bogle, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Butron Malkiel, "Liberalismus" by Ludwig von Mises, "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, "A Treatise of Human Nature" by David Hume, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahn…
12 Rules for Life
The Easy Way To Stop Smoking, by Alan Carr. Very logically made me realise that willpower was really just about changing how you talk to yourself. Essentially learning impulse control. I lost a deadly, expensive habit and a fair bit of weight. Clean for 6 years.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I learned to be less Arthur and more Ford about my approach to living my life in general, and dealing with Fenchurch winking out of existence in particular.
Particularly Ford in the third book then, huh?
:-D
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did "1984" change your life?
I was probably to young for the book when I read it (about 15): the explicit description of a brain-wash torture with the result, that two lovers won't recognize each other emotionally anymore afterwards was beyond my imagination and left me with a mild form of capgras delusion that lasts until today.
So, that's what it is called? Thank you.
The Space Merchants, co-written by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. Mind you, I was barely a teenager at the time I read it. But: -It led me down the path to the realization that advertising in almost all of its current forms is unequivocally evil and has no credible moral justification in our current society. I have been running adblocking software on all of my devices (and that of my family's) and feel mildly dis…
Corporate greed and advertisement is quite old, though.
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind , by Shunryu Suzuki I was 19 and living in a van, camping under bridge overpasses in Colorado so I could just ski all day every day. My naive uneducated mind was formulating some sort of psuedo-hippy philosophy around the state of ecstasy reached in the perfect ride down a mountain through powder. Little did I know the "no-thought" mantra I had been inculcating was just a pale impression of…