Mark Cuban's "How to Win at the Sport of Business" is top drawer for me.
Ask HN: Book under 100 pages that changed your life the most?
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Re: Ask HN: Book under 100 pages that changed your life the most?
#2"Letters To A Young Poet" by Rainer Maria Rilke. There is a new edition of this work that now includes the letters the young poet wrote in response, long thought to be lost. I plan to pick that one up in addition to my Stephen Mitchell translation.
Re: Ask HN: Book under 100 pages that changed your life the most?
#3Dunno about changing my life the most, but this is what comes to mind, because it helped me accept my mortality:
The Dalai Lama’s Book of Wisdom[0] includes a page on the practice of considering each day a number of ways (eight, here) a person might die, towards dying with more grace when the time comes. I started practicing and found it an engaging creative exercise. It’s also helped me take better care of other living things, and to see non-human animals as people, too. I’m still part of numerous kill-chains (weeding the garden, turning the compost, walking, using electricity, eating plants and animals, paying U.S. taxes and benefiting from the infrastructure, and so many more), and I accept that as part of living.
[0] https://www.worldcat.org/title/dalai-lamas-book-of-wisdom/oc...
Re: Ask HN: Book under 100 pages that changed your life the most?
#4On the Shortness of Life by Seneca
Re: Ask HN: Book under 100 pages that changed your life the most?
#5"Letters To A Young Poet" by Rainer Maria Rilke. There is a new edition of this work that now includes the letters the young poet wrote in response, long thought to be lost. I plan to pick that one up in addition to my Stephen Mitchell translation.
I have a Stephen Mitchell translated Tao Te Ching which I read cover to cover whenever I feel stuck.
Will take a look at this as well, thanks.
Re: Ask HN: Book under 100 pages that changed your life the most?
#6I think the most attractive and memorable short books that spring to mind are:
1. Fear, Thich Nhat Hanh, helps you cope with anything
2. The Stranger, Camus, Nihilism/Stoicism
3. The old man and the sea, Hemmingway
Re: Ask HN: Book under 100 pages that changed your life the most?
#7Thanks for sharing Mark Cuban’s book. It has some very tangible and practical words of wisdom that aren’t just masturbatory feel good stories in there.
It’s quite old and maybe overplayed but I enjoy THE ART OF MONEY GETTING or GOLDEN RULES FOR MAKING MONEY By P.T. Barnum. His insights might be about 200 years old, but they are in the exact same vein, and perhaps a bit more tasteful language.
Re: Ask HN: Book under 100 pages that changed your life the most?
#8The Art of Being Right - Schopenhauer
Re: Ask HN: Book under 100 pages that changed your life the most?
#9The Richest Man In Babylon was a really good and quick read.
Re: Ask HN: Book under 100 pages that changed your life the most?
#10I think that at a similar sort of length are the lengthier essays in the London Review of Books, New Left Review, etc. Some of them impinge on rather controversial topics (and would of course elicit some disagreement), but they’re perfectly good reads nevertheless (though I suppose that that’s orthogonal to merely pointing out that I, rightly or wrongly, ended up influenced by this sort of thing.)
Tom Crewe wrote of ‘The Strange Death of Municipal England’ on 15 June 2016 (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n24/tom-crewe/the-strang...). I suppose that at the time I was broadly a utilitarian and had very évolué/neoliberal politics. This exposed something of a tension between them and I ended up at a rather different place politically. I suppose that I am rather a slave to, if not passions, pangs of guilt, and so occasionally a day or two will be upended in (often useless) politicking of one sort or another—a moderately important feature of my life. The other article that had some effect was Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘The Invention of the Indigène’ (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/mahmood-mamdani/the-...).
The second effect, I suppose, was to broadly influence my intellectual outlook: first, in a rather uncritically admiring sort of way, and then, beginning with the observation that the book reviews never mentioned the books, more critically: untranslated French is a good reminder that I ought to read French newspapers more often, but when will the historians be reminded e.g. to understand elementary probability? Useless chattering is an excellent pastime however, and the LRB was terribly good fodder.