Derek Sivers: Books I've Read

Always found your notes useful, helps me decide whether to read a book.

An alternative to blinkist is https://www.getabstract.com/en/

A small basic question.

How do you implement all the different ideas for a good life that you find in all different books that you read?

It's very tough for me to do so. More often than not, I get lost and drift aimlessly.

Thanks for the excellent list :)

Blinkist asks you to pay after some time. That's what deters me.

Regarding the Mindwise book, I recently read Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis where he talks about (at least what I interpreted) the silliness of good vs evil and differing beliefs. I haven't read his 2nd book but the title - " The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion", suggests it might be something similar to the Mindwise book.

Great list, Derek. Do you use Goodreads to organize your reading, by any chance? Your author profile would seem to be unclaimed over there:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2766361.Derek_Sivers

I found your site through Ferriss' podcast and have been using that list for a while. It's a gold mine, thanks for sharing it!

Thanks for the great list Derek. I just bought Ego is the Enemy - I live by the same author's Daily Stoic book, so I am looking forward to this one as well.

I am an aspiring writer (I have written about 20 books, some of them are pretty good). I am addicted to writing and your book Anything You Want helped me understand what I needed to work on. Thanks again!

My Sivers, I've been reading about you for years. I love your story about how you scaled CD Baby with People instead of Algorithms. I think its of greater advice now in a startup world where every thought of every startup is that everything has to operate with a robot brain.

I lost my value in most books in 2010, We have lots of reads in common 2010 and my feeling about books is that lots fall under motivational porn and they provide instant gratification then things you can apply.

Seeing your list now I want to read Arnold Schwarzenegger book Total Recall and tempted to read Zero to One.

I would love to aspire to your level of success you had with CD Baby.

Derek, as you probably already know, most of your writing is of great inspiration for many people, including me. I have tried to create a list of "books I've read" like you, and I failed (many excuses not to do it, apparently). I think it's a great exercise per se, besides whether people would find it interesting or not.

I promise I will give it another try :)

p.s. I highly recommend 1491 and 1493, two of my all-time favorite books.

Any further progress on that list of short, straightforward maxims to live by?

How do you read so many books? I want to get into the habit of reading more but I always seems to struggle finding the time.

Given how extensive your notes are on most of those books, it would be interesting to know what process you have to take them while reading. I've always been a very lean note-taker and find this is the reasons I quickly forget many valuable insights from the books I read. Any tips?

I'm a pitifully slow reader, I like to stop often and think about new concepts or insights so I can internalize them better. This way of reading is my biggest obstacle in finishing books. I've tried speeding reading and while I can finish chapters faster, I retain much less information like ~40% of concepts.

Any tips for readers like me? Thank you for the wonderful list, I'd like to get through it in this decade if possible :(

Dude, there's so much you can learn from books before 2000. If for no other reason than that it's an amazing way to get out of your filter bubble.

I think most readers here are in that category though, but I feel the same way as you do towards this kind of books and their readership.

I don't know how many self help and sometimes slightly spiritual books my mother will have to go through before finally feeling good enough with her life. She read a ton of them and yet the benefits seems scarce to the outer eye. Here it looks the same but with an entrepreneur vibe, which doesn't make it better.

> If you are not reading a regular amount of classics, you are doomed to be historically parochial.

Precisely. Often, I cannot relate to classics, and therefore end up feeling let down and questioning the hype. But the reason it is a classic is because it stood out from peers at the time. It is this quality of classics that I believe you are referring to.

> Pop social science and business self-help books are like chocolate - healthy in small doses, as part of a balanced diet.

I suppose it's more like sugar for the brain. Too much of it is bad. But I see what you mean.

I use Paul Graham's advice from his "How You Know" essay http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html

"Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists."

Also check out It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/its-okay-to-forget-w...

I tend to remember a general evoked feeling from waht I've read rather than the details of each "wow" moment. If I remember a book having some profoind effect, it's worth reading again sometime down the line.

Similar to what Cal Fussman says, "the good shit sticks."

To me, reading is more about developing an internal vocabulary that makes it easy to bridge two ideas together—ultimately enabling you to create ideas of your own. With more ideas to pull from, you can ask yourself better questions.

Here's an interesting perspective on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR2P5vW-nVc

I’d also like to know the answer to this question. My interpretation is that adding some commentary alongside lines copied from the book would fall under Fair Use of Copyrighted Material. But it’s so gray.

I kept my book notes private for years because I assumed it would violate some copyright law to post them.

But one day I tried it anyway. Kept it quiet. But after years, people kept discovering it.

Now the authors contact me thanking me for highlighting their book. And publishers offer to send me new books asking to be included in my list.

So... I guess they don't mind!

I think if you encourage people to buy the book, and aren't trying to replace the book, nobody will complain.

Many? The link only talks about chapter 4 of his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

The one with James Altucher is great as well

No amount of self help books is too much, because they have no effect anyway.