91–100 of 365 posts
It does an "explain like I'm 13" for how the idea of markets and money started, how and why it changed through the centuries and where we are now.
It's so easy to read, that it took me a couple of days to finish it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it recently and didn't like it that much. 1/3 of the book is author praising himself for what he had accomplished, another 1/3 are success stories from his patients and one-sided presentation of research that agrees with his points. The rest 1/3 of the book I found interesting. As many modern books - it suffers from lack of focus; my opinion.
If you don't mind me asking, do you suffer from any of the things he discusses in the book? I'm just curious to know how our context differs if any, not trying to imply anything else. For me at least, there were things he talked about which felt like there was someone/something that understood and that there was a chance to work forward through things. There were also a few things I read which... well, lets just say…
Yes, the book was recommended by my therapist. There were interesting and helpful parts to the book, in my case specifically the idea that it's hard to be anxious in a relaxed body, the yoga part, and the chapter about psyche being composed of different parts that protect one another and you can ask them to "step aside" were the most influential.
So I took useful things out of it, but I cannot say it is well written. In particular a lot of "meta" conversation would have been better left out. Like coming back to the DSM classification and ranting how it doesn't include childhood traumas even thou the author feels he demonstrated they should be a separate entity. And on research - I don't know much, but I know something about epigenetics. There was a chapter that touched upon epigenetics (about how stressors change the expression of our genes), and the papers were cherry-picked to agree with what the author was saying. I didn't like that and this made me doubt some of the cited literature in other chapters that I cannot judge on my own.
_Small Gods_ is about religion, belief and humanity's relationship with their gods, and about eagles dropping tortoises onto stones to crack them open.
How to win friends and influence people, Dale Carnegie.
It was the original "self help" book, and the principles there are so simple yet powerful that will resonate a self evident. However these are mostly ignored, and the same as with common sense which happens to be the less common of the senses.
The Bible - as an original source of all types of stories and narratives you’ll find in 99% of all fiction books and movies. New Testament — as an original source of most of moral principles and ideas modern european civilization is based upon (also fundamental stories and narratives).
The best two books for engineers are 1) “How to win friends and influence people” 2) “Never split the difference” The first one will teach you how to work with people. The second will teach you how to negotiate salaries, raises, and promotions among other things. I don’t recommend many technical books because engineers can find all of that on the internet and are much more at risk of being bad at people stuff.
> 1) “How to win friends and influence people” The folks I know who have this on their bookshelf tend to be dishonest, manipulative, self-centered pricks.
If you want to go deeper in understanding the West, it's recommendable to also get a rough idea of it's philosophers, especially the Greeks and the important ones up to Kant, including Descartes' idea of the social contract.
If you still want to know more, you should read about the most important economic ideas, e.g. Smith, Keynes, Marx.