"How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything: Yes, Anything" by Albert Ellis.
Helped me with my depression, enough said.
Ask HN: Which book/essay changed your life?
11–20 of 49 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which book/essay changed your life?
#12Anastasia (The Ringing Cedars Series) - probably would not have built our house without it. It is strangely different.
Re: Ask HN: Which book/essay changed your life?
#13The C Programming Language, by Brian W Kernighan and Dennis M Ritchie.
I had tried to learn BASIC and Pascal. And it never really clicked. But K&R’s book explained the language, how it worked, and how to program — in the most primitively satisfying way.
Re: Ask HN: Which book/essay changed your life?
#14The Book Thief and Educated made realise how important is to have the freedom to learn and how improving yourself is never a waste of time.
Crucial Conversations improved my communication skills by 10x.
In terms of tech I really enjoyed The Unicorn Project. Made me realise how awesome our industry is and how easy you can make your work count.
Re: Ask HN: Which book/essay changed your life?
#15The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World by William D Nordhaus, 2018 Nobel laureate for economics and professor at Yale. He makes a compelling argument that market mechanisms, such as a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, is the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions. I now understand why the majority of economists agree with this approach.
Re: Ask HN: Which book/essay changed your life?
#16The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World by William D Nordhaus, 2018 Nobel laureate for economics and professor at Yale. He makes a compelling argument that market mechanisms, such as a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, is the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions. I now understand why the majority of economists agree with this approach.
What are some of the most innovative applications that aid the development of a carbon market that you've seen?
Re: Ask HN: Which book/essay changed your life?
#17"I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" and "Meditations on Moloch" by Scott Alexander (on his previous blog Slate Star Codex)
Re: Ask HN: Which book/essay changed your life?
#18The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley. Three American students are sent to three of the smartest countries (based on PISA scores): Finland, Poland, and Korea. The same was done vice versa. It was fascinating to learn how these three leading countries are able to perform so well with dramatically different policies. And it provides interesting insights as to why America is struggling to compete.
Re: Ask HN: Which book/essay changed your life?
#19A few have yes. Off the top of my head both fiction and non-fiction, Feyerabend's Against Method, Capital Marx, Orthodoxy Chesterton, Blood Meridian McCarthy, VALIS P.K. Dick, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas Le Guin, Sirens of Titan Vonnegut, Finite and Infinite Games
James P. Carse, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning Girard, Discipline and Punish Foucault, Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher, some of Land's earlier work like Meltdown.
That's some of the stuff that comes to mind as having shifted my perception on things in some fundamental ways. I don't think I've ever practically changed anything in my life though as a response to reading a book, not sure how that would even manifest.
Re: Ask HN: Which book/essay changed your life?
#20Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky, it is a book that explains a lot of human behavior (it's soo complicated) and as I went reading a lot of "clicks" happened in my mind of why some people do what they do.