Ten Productivity Books You Won't Regret Reading | Hacker News Reader

Ten Productivity Books You Won't Regret Reading

mokacoding.com

16 pointsmokagio12 comments

Is it odd that 30% of these books are by one author whose made a living peddling self-help books?

Cal Newport is not “peddling” anything. He’s a respected academic in computer science and has written 3 books a lot of people find immensely helpful. The beauty of a free economy is that you (and everyone else) has the choice to buy/read anything, or not. Cal’s superbly insightful books are not forced or “pedalled” upon anyone.

bites bait You think Cal is entirely 1/3 of what we collectively "need to know"?

There are lots of respected academics in computer science. Apparently he chose to spend his time writing 3 versions of the same book for money: How to Win at College (2005), How to Become a Straight-A Student (2006), and How to Be a High-School Superstar (2010). And he's by definition peddling. Not sure why you took offense to that and not sure where the "free" economy has any relevance to what I said. The irony is I could sum up in one page what all those books combined contain.

Dr. Calvin Newport is a tenured professor of computer science and has written/published over a hundred well-cited academic papers. https://scholar.google.pt/citations?user=EhodjeAAAAAJ

In his spare time he has written several highly rated books which a lot of people find helpful/useful: https://www.amazon.com/Cal-Newport/e/B001IGNR0U

In his first 3 books Cal wrote about what he knew, "being a great student". His PhD from MIT is a pretty good indication that he "won" at academia. You clearly haven't read the books because they cover different topics. Sure their is overlap but they are definitely not "the same book", else his publisher would not have released it. You wouldn't say the 7 Harry Potter books are "all the same book" even though they are similar. It's the same with Cal's books, similar but definitely not the same.

For the record: I'm not "offended" by people hating on Cal, just disappointed that haters are not making anything better.

If you can indeed sum up all that is contained in Cal's 6 books in one page, do it! I will gladly read that page pay you $1000 for the condensed wisdom. 100% seriously, do it!

The "free market" is highly relevant because it means anyone can make/sell/buy good/services as they choose. If you don't want to buy/read a book you are free not to. But unless you produce something better or offer an alternative recommendation, don't be a hater on Cal's content.

How many New York Times bestsellers have you written in your spare time? ;-)

That's nice. Here's a list of a ton of highly cited computer scientists, many of them of which didn't spin a self-help career: http://www.guide2research.com/scientists/

There's really no such thing as spare time. He could've spent all that time writing self-help by doing more research. Since there's a huge supply of self-help and everyone being begged to be told what to do and it requires no real sense of expertise other than anecdotes, its an easy, albeit time consuming, income. There's not a huge supply of good research.

Highly rated books, especially on Amazon are a dime-a-dozen. For example, Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life has been on the amazon best-seller list for 61 weeks and that book is poorly edited and contains incredibly bad advice. If you'd like me to elaborate, I can but that would have to be in another post.

The books may cover different topics, but the theme remains the same. In order to be a great student, you have to do what your told, engage with the lessons, do the assignments and study to pass the tests. It's that simple. It's all about finding the time to do the work and doing it in the best way you can. A plethora of strategies to achieve this can be found online from note taking strategies, to reading papers, to reading books on specific topics, etc. with most of it being free. However, the easiest way is to simply ignore all the extra brain power needed to adhere to the systems and engage with the work.

You also have to come to the realization that even if you do the work, you may reach limitations that you cannot overcome and you may need to accept some hard truths about things you may not be able to achieve. For example, you may not get into MIT, you may not build a successful, huge company, you may not complete a degree. However, its the experiences that make you successful, not the prestige. You also have to understand that certain socio-economic factors that are completely out of your control can cause you not to reach these goals as well.

Now that I've condensed half the contents of those 3 books into 2 paragraphs, care to pay me $500 and call it good? You also mis-characterized my original claim that I could sum all 6 books into 1 page, when I meant the 3 books about being a great student.

The "free market" is highly relevant because it means anyone can make/sell/buy good/services as they choose. If you don't want to buy/read a book you are free not to. But unless you produce something better or offer an alternative recommendation, don't be a hater on Cal's content.

It's not highly relevant, because you aren't required to produce anything better or offer an alternative recommendation. One can simply critique the current iteration and cause people to give pause for thought and look elsewhere. Also, what if there is nothing better? What if its all crap and people don't know it? What if people just read my two paragraphs, started applying their own minds and didn't need a 224 page book to tell them some truisms?

I could give a crap about what some arbitrary newspaper claims is a great book via sales numbers and some "secret formula". How many people bought the book and never read it? What if the book simply gamed the formula to get on the list?

and I think it's his last 3 of 6, that made this top 10. He must be awesome. Place your bets please on which his next will knock off the list.

Or the author of the post might be biased?

Having read all ten of these books I can agree with the sentiment that i didn’t “regret” reading them, however describing them as “productivity” is a poor classification. Personal Effectiveness is a much better description. People often use “productive” and “effective” interchangeably but they really aren’t remotely the same thing. Productivity is related to quantity of output, whereas Effectivness is the act of using ones creative energy for the highest value. If in the same amount of time/effort you can make 100 worthless “widgets” or 1 excellently made product which should you pursue? One sounds “productive” whereas the other is “effective”.

Can anyone pick the best from the list? I read getting things done and its a good pamphlet stretched into a book.

I suspect the entire category of self-help books could be described as "a good pamphlet stretched into a book"...

Thinking Fast and Slow is a good book that is not at all a cheesy self-help pamphlet. It's a review of some of the more surprising findings of behavioral economics, and a discussion of how we should and shouldn't rely on heuristics in our decision making. It does suffer a little bit in that some of the topics have failed replication, and it could be about half as long as it actually is.

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