Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

I read it 45 years ago and liked it. But the only thing that sticks in my memory -- and it is enough, I suppose -- is the author helping his friend fix his motorcycle with a piece of shim made on the spot from a Coke can.

Definitely "The Machine That Changed the World" by Womack, Jones, and Roos [0]. This is "the first book to reveal Toyota's lean production system." Before reading it, I had never imagined just-in-time production or value chain mapping, or vehicle assembly lines that can profitably produce quantity one of a product before being reconfigured to produce a different model (SMED: single minute exchange of die).

Now I see muda everywhere and cringe when I overhear people talking about applying kaizen and how they think they're practicing "continuous improvement" while repeating the same rote, industrial, mindless processes that they have been for the last 40 years. We can do so much better. Toyota tried very hard to teach GM how at their NUMMI[1] plant, but it wasn't the right location relative to their suppliers for JIT to fully work and "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

[0] https://www.lean.org/Bookstore/ProductDetails.cfm?SelectedPr... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI

Glad that somebody pointed that out. IMO, if somebody wants to get a quick overview of genetics, their time would be much better spent watching lectures 4-7 from Sapolsky's Human Behavioural Biology lectures [1]. In those 4 lectures Sapolsky's explores contradicting theories about (among other things) the unit of selection and gradualism. Highly recommend the whole series.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dRXA1_e30o&list=PL150326949...

Dawkins is amazingly lucid when he sticks to topics he knows very well. “The Selfish Gene” and “The Extended Phenotype” were world altering for me. Like integral calculus, I rarely have cause to apply the concept in the domain in which it was described, but the understanding that his conveyance of the material shaped in me is something I feel in my thinking every day, more than two decades later.

“The Mating Mind” by Geoffrey Miller (another biologist who would do the world a favor by sticking to his domain of expertise) came to me more recently but has left a similar impression. It impeccably elaborates upon the power of sexual selection and how it intertwines with natural selection.

Antifragile: 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 connect more with my loved ones, changed my perspective on research, what's important and the power of the passing of time. It definitely impacted my life.