One is Ayyuhal Walad (Dear Beloved Son) by Al-Ghazali. The book is advice given to a student seeking advice. It might be worth learning Arabic just to read Al-Ghazali (along with Rumi, etc). Al-Ghazali's writing is amazing, but much of it gets lost in translation. It has a kind of savagery that translators tend to leave out.
It's very theological and possibly hard to get into, but I'll try to summarize it a little for a more secular crowd:
1. Theologically, you have already been given all the advice you need. There's no point to asking Al-Ghazali for advice; but you, the beloved son seeking advice, refuse to read and follow God's words. When you follow your desires [1], the correct advice tastes bitter.
2. A sign that God has turned away from an individual is that the individual spends all their time on unimportant things.
3. A common form of chasing unimportant things is knowledge. Knowledge is a tool, not an achievement. It is arguably sinful to chase knowledge that is left unused.
4. Knowledge without action is insanity, action without knowledge is wasteful. They are always coupled.
5. Prayer alone does not qualify one for Heaven (plenty of Islamic citations included). It's actions that lead to Heaven, often in the form of resisting desires [1] and acting upon given knowledge.
[1] Footnote on "desire": There's not really a good English word for "nafs", as it has both positive and negative connotations. Desire is not simply sexual. It includes desire for financial safety and freedom from work. Desire to sleep late into the night under a warm blanked. Desire to avoid fighting in wars. Desire to not give to charity when poor. Desire to be seen and respected as an intellectual.
And so the act of working and feeding your family with honest work is the kind of action that puts one in heaven. The act of giving to charity when one is poor. The act of night/dawn prayer (there's a whole chapter on night prayer). The act of humbly receiving advice from someone of lower 'rank'. The act of not sucking up to kings or showing off. The seeking of knowledge, especially the burdensome kind of knowledge that puts responsibility on yourself.
Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck is a great writer, and he did a great job of illustrating the effects of poverty and how it controls people's actions. I often think about the camp that gives them a roof and restores their dignity. I want to create this sort of good in the world.
No more Mr Nice Guy - "Nice guys" do things to guilt people into reciprocating. When it doesn't happen in the way they expect (e.g. love), they get bitter. If you want something, say it. If you expect a specific kind of reciprocation, make it explicit.
How to win friends and influence people - I remember it as: if you want people to help you, be considerate of their needs and feelings. Seek mutually beneficial agreements. This is so unlike the way conflict resolution is portrayed in movies. It was an important lesson for teenage me.
The Secret Life of Trees - Trees are really cool! You should read The Overstory instead though, because it's a really good (fiction) book that touches on the same topics.
Salt, fat, acid, heat - The lesson is the title. Balance these 4 things, taste often. My cooking improved drastically after reading this book. It's recommended all the time for a reason.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck - Konmari for social obligations. If it's not useful and doesn't bring joy, don't do it. Not worth reading past the first chapter, but still a great concept.
Pretty much any of Nassim Taleb's stuff, but Antifragile is his best. He put into words things I'd had an inkling about for a long time, and he does it with more eloquence than I ever could.
- Don't destroy what you don't understand (Chesterton's Fence).
- Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. A cliche for sure, but rarely understood by moderns. See: DDT, Mao's Sparrows, GMO crops, etc.
- Eat no fruits from the past one-thousand years, drink nothing from the past four thousand.
- A man with debt or a salary is a slave. A man who has a reputation to uphold is also a slave.
- Read Socrates and drink barolo, read Game of Thrones and drink beer, but don't drink martinis and read the New Yorker; i.e. indulge in the high-brow and the low-brow, but stay away from the middle-brow - it's pretentious.
- 20 spare cots is a nice preparation to make when you only ever need an extra 10, but you should have prepared for when you need an extra 400, because now you need an extra 400 and you have none to spare; i.e. efficiency and the most-likely scenarios don't account for fat-tail events, and it's the fat-tails that will kill you, lest you understand them and prepare for them, like a pandemic.
The effects these have had on me:
- No longer experience FOMO.
- I am far less envious.
- More relaxed, non-reactive, and not easily sensationalized.
- I've developed a healthy skepticism for the new and shiny, especially in regard to scientific studies.
- Better at detecting and ignoring noise, versus signal.
- Better understand the strengths and value of tradition and religion, especially Christianity.
- Better ability to evaluate risks, upsides/downsides.
- I'm better at distinguishing a true wise man from a fool.
- I understand how iatrogenic modern medicine is, and so I am able to keep me and my family healthier by foregoing the expedient prescriptions of fragile doctors.
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There's more, but words are failing me, and that's the gist.
Remarkable book that gave me a coherent framework to think about life. The title simply does not do it enough justice, it's not just about the "flow" state, it's about his mental framework for how to organize your life with flow as the centerpiece of your experience.
I've used the copy on my desk so much, dipping in and out I now remember most of the chapters, sub-sections and so on. I'm starting to feel I'm using this book the same way many religious people use their Bibles, Gita etc..maybe I'll eventually memorize large parts of it.
2. Why we do what we do by Edward Deci
It's an older book about human motivation and how it works, it changed the way I think about how to get myself or other people to act meaningfully and I'd say that touched almost all aspects of my behavior.
Diary of an Early American Boy - Eric Sloane. This book spoke to my heart in a deep and profound way.
The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill - Everything you want to know about the practice of electronics, as opposed to theory, once you're going to design electronics.
The Engineer's Notebook series - Forest Mims III - Once I was in electronics, gave a ton of useful tips.
What do you care what other people think - Richard Feynman, a good set of lessons about expectations and motivations of others, as told by one the folks on the Manhattan project.
Computer Lib / Dream Machines - Ted Nelson - A great exposition of what computers could be used to do, We're nowhere near catching up yet.
George Gilder: When Bandwidth Is Free - Interview in Wired Magazine - https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gilder-4/ - It was here (I think) that I first heard his call to waste transistors in pursuit of performance, that the BitGrid came into mind as a viable idea.
The Cluetrain Manifesto - Levine, Locke, Searls, Weinberger - Changed the way I view the internet and advertising.
It's not a book, but I consider this movie important enough to mention it here: "What the bleep do we know!?"
I saw it around 2005 and it was mind-blowing to me.
No offense, but I cannot let a recommendation for this film go unchallenged. This film is just trashy pseudo-scientific new-agey mambo jambo from beginning to end. It essentially started the whole "use your mind to quantum mechanically alter the vibrational frequencies of reality" brand of quackery. It's a film not worth anyone's time.
Bigtime agree, I shut it off after 20 minutes because it made zero sense. It was a giant ad for a cult group ("Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment"), and the guy that made the movie went on to join the NXIVM cult.
2009 points|apitman|5 years ago|1165 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087418
Ask HN: What books fundamentally changed the way you think about the world?
152 points|gtrevize|7 years ago|214 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13803787
Ask HN: What are the books that changed the perspective of your life?
88 points|arjitkp|9 years ago|118 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9348119