- Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better
- Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
Best book/paper you read in 2018?
11–20 of 40 posts
Re: Best book/paper you read in 2018?
#12“Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst” by Sapolsky was my favorite. I knew little about neurobiology, and this went a little deeper.
Re: Best book/paper you read in 2018?
#13“Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst” by Sapolsky was my favorite. I knew little about neurobiology, and this went a little deeper.
Sapolsky's 25 lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology: He's such a wonderful lecturer.
Re: Best book/paper you read in 2018?
#14The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (the book itself is 20 years old but I only read it recently). It’s a fantastic analysis of why successful companies get displaced by disruptive technologies —or, the other way around, why it’s so complicated to innovate in successful companies.
The underlying reasons exposed by the book are timeless and universal. As I read the book (which, again, is 20 years old and focuses on the hard drive industry) I recognized all the pitfalls my previous company went through as it was trying to adapt to public Cloud.
This book is a powerful lens to look at disruptive innovation, well-written and very thoroughly researched. A must read if you’re working in technology IMO.
Re: Best book/paper you read in 2018?
#15Shoe dog by Phil Knight. It's a memoir by the co-founder of Nike. This is one of my favorite books till now. The biggest reason being that it's a perfect combo of personal and business story of company that started with $50 and is now selling over $30B of goods annually. It's motivational, lucid, and keeps you on your toes. Phil is a great story-teller and I almost felt as if I was part of the story. A definite 5/5.
Re: Best book/paper you read in 2018?
#16Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Alboom, really great book about life and everything brilliant about it.
Re: Best book/paper you read in 2018?
#17Inadequate Equilibria - Where and How civilizations get stuck
By Eliezer Yudkowsky
First book in a long time which really made me see the world differently and taught better thinking.
Re: Best book/paper you read in 2018?
#18Thorstein Veblen's "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899). The book was difficult to read for me since the language is very archaic, but it pretty much explained a lot about how class and community is structured.
As an introvert and a social recluse, this book is a goldmine; it eased a lot of confusions in my head about how society and class structures work, and taught me to better avoid the pitfalls of consumerism and peer pressure.
Re: Best book/paper you read in 2018?
#19Thorstein Veblen's "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899). The book was difficult to read for me since the language is very archaic, but it pretty much explained a lot about how class and community is structured. As an introvert and a social recluse, this book is a goldmine; it eased a lot of confusions in my head about how society and class structures work, and taught me to better avoid the pitfalls of consumerism…
I loved that too! Apparently there was Veblen craze in the US when that came out, Veblen societies everywhere. Here's a bit I liked:
...the cheap, and therefore indecorous, articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy of machine-made goods as compared with the hand-wrought article is their greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both. Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the characterisation here given would have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper. - p162
Re: Best book/paper you read in 2018?
#20The best book hands down in 2018 is "Bad Blood". Especially if you're into tech and entrepreneurship. It highlights exactly how crazy the system is in Silicon Valley. and how VC's eat their own dog food. This is something that people like Chamath Palihapitiya and Alexis Ohanian are currently trying to finger point. Silicon Valley is broken and this book is the perfect illustration of the reasons why.
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