What is the book that has completely changed your way of thinking?

Yeah, I'm not trying to be a big-time PUA or anything either. But as a guy who was the stereotypical geek in at least one regard - being horrible at meeting and interacting with women - I've learned a ton since reading The Game and joining some of the PUA forums and reading some of their material.

I've gotten more dates and had more success in the past year and a half than I probably had in my life up to that point.

Truth be told though, I think it's as much "magic sword" syndrome as anything. I big part of being successful with women is confidence, as we've all been told. Unfortunately you can't just tell somebody "go out and be confident with women" if they're not confident with women! But you can say "Here, here's this opener and some routines and some theories about attraction, and if you use this stuff you'll be successful" which gives them a certain form of confidence, which leads to some success, which leads to more confidence, etc. I look at it as way to kick off a positive feedback loop. Sorta like giving a young knight a "magic sword" to give him the confidence to go out and slay dragons.

Whether there's really much to the actual theories and what-not is debatable, but I have no doubt that dabbling in the PUA world has improved my life. And The Game was my "gateway drug" into that world, so it was definitely an influential book to me.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. It talks about good and bad design in everyday objects through lots of enlightening and amusing stories and examples (doors that look like you should push them but you actually have to pull, mixing boards with dozens of identical knobs, aircraft software that hides important state information, etc). It provides some interesting insights from cognitive science and psychology too. It definitely made me a lot more conscious of how I went about making things that people would use and how those things could effectively communicate through their design what should be done with them. This also had an impact into how I went about communicating in general.

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

Without a doubt. The big takeaway from the book is that when you encounter something that's hard to use, it's not your fault for not knowing how to use it. It's the thing's fault for being badly designed. Read this book.

Heinlein: He presents a characterization (or characterizations), but some of his core points soak in over time, as one gains one's own life experience.

Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance": For letting me know I was/am not alone (even in my alone-ness).

Upon reflection, I guess these books haven't changed my way of thinking. But they've influenced them. Perhaps Heinlein helped me to change from approaching the world as it was presented to me to approaching it as I actually saw and see it. Pirsig helped me recognize and... formalize[1], at least for myself, some of my thoughts on quality.

Emily Dickinson: Less really can be more. So much more.

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EDIT: Re [1], perhaps "explore" would be a better word.

The Biology of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton The Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand The Attractor Factor by Joe Vitale The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz