What is the book that has completely changed your way of thinking? | Hacker News Reader

What is the book that has completely changed your way of thinking?

20 pointsKishoreKumar33 comments

Someone suggested me "How to win friends & Infuence people". I read it 4 times in past 3 months. And I'll keep reading it through out my life. It has completely changed the way I see things. Now before I speak I think and I can understand how many mistakes I've been doing. It had a lot of impact on me. Like wise, are there any other books? Which book had such an impact on your way of looking at things?

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The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. It talks about good and bad design in everyday objects through lots of enlightening and amusing stories and examples (doors that look like you should push them but you actually have to pull, mixing boards with dozens of identical knobs, aircraft software that hides important state information, etc). It provides some interesting insights from cognitive science and psychology too. It definitely made me a lot more conscious of how I went about making things that people would use and how those things could effectively communicate through their design what should be done with them. This also had an impact into how I went about communicating in general.

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

Without a doubt. The big takeaway from the book is that when you encounter something that's hard to use, it's not your fault for not knowing how to use it. It's the thing's fault for being badly designed. Read this book.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad opened my eyes to some commercial realities of the world. I realised the career I was training for wasn't going to give me the life I wanted, so I began focusing more time learning about money, investements, business etc.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a book I've never been able to get more than 1/3 of the way through, but its 'Circle of Control' framework made me a much happier and more content person.

I enjoyed Dale Carnegie, but took some of the lessons on board a little too much, which got me into trouble in some social situations where I didn't have awareness (eg, using mirroring or copying techniques to build rapport, and later discovering I was standing next to my girlfriend and flirting with other women!).

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), In Memory Yet Green/In Joy Still Felt (Isaac Asimov), The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein).

Those books are probably what made me into a self-sufficient human being who wants to stand on his own and keep living the best he can.

I can think of a handful of books that have had a major impact on me. Off the top of my head:

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Game - Neil Strauss

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank

Business @ The Speed of Thought - Bill Gates

The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki

The Game is an interesting book for a lot of reasons; I don't agree with the idea of picking up tons of random women or some of the methodology he espouses, but it's a powerful book for making people sit up and realize that yes, you can change your life, and yes, you have the tools to do it. It says that "Hey, people think in certain ways and you can hack that," which may be the first time a lot of people encounter any kind of social engineering.

Yeah, I'm not trying to be a big-time PUA or anything either. But as a guy who was the stereotypical geek in at least one regard - being horrible at meeting and interacting with women - I've learned a ton since reading The Game and joining some of the PUA forums and reading some of their material.

I've gotten more dates and had more success in the past year and a half than I probably had in my life up to that point.

Truth be told though, I think it's as much "magic sword" syndrome as anything. I big part of being successful with women is confidence, as we've all been told. Unfortunately you can't just tell somebody "go out and be confident with women" if they're not confident with women! But you can say "Here, here's this opener and some routines and some theories about attraction, and if you use this stuff you'll be successful" which gives them a certain form of confidence, which leads to some success, which leads to more confidence, etc. I look at it as way to kick off a positive feedback loop. Sorta like giving a young knight a "magic sword" to give him the confidence to go out and slay dragons.

Whether there's really much to the actual theories and what-not is debatable, but I have no doubt that dabbling in the PUA world has improved my life. And The Game was my "gateway drug" into that world, so it was definitely an influential book to me.

On Intelligence By Jeff Hawkins.

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/080507853...

Hawkins was the founder of both Palm and Handspring, but comes from an academic background where he studied neuropsychology (how the brain works). The book is a thorough look at how the brain experiences the world, with the goal being the creation of artificially intelligent machines.

It'll change the way you perceive perception (if that makes any sense).

Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman, while not the most influential book I've read, affects my thinking on a daily basis. Whenever something bad happens to me or I come across a mental block, I use a few techniques from the book to keep it from affecting me.

Keep in mind, my definition of "bad" is pretty loose. For example, one of the bad events I encounter on a regular basis is being stumped by a difficult math problem. If I were to allow myself to fall into a pessimistic line of thinking, it would make solving problems that much harder in the future.

Seligman found that pessimistic people learn to be helpless and that once they do, they stop believing in their ability to change things. For example, a certain subset of subjects who were given a series of unsolvable problems were unable to solve simple anagrams afterward. These people, according to the theory, learned to be helpless. However, there was a subset of people who were able to solve the anagrams. These were the people, according to the theory, who had developed the ability to remain optimistic in spite of misfortune.

Amazon link to the book: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1400078393/

I've never read a book, no matter how weird or even badly written that didn't have a bit in it somewhere that stuck. There is gold to be found just about everywhere. A single book that has changed your way of thinking, and I would assume that you meant 'in a positive way'?

For me if I had to point at a single book it would have to be Bill Bryson, A short history of nearly everything.

It shows besides being a very compact overview of how we got where we are today how often we repeat our mistakes and how easy it would be to make this world a much better place than it is today and which forces are holding that back. It changed maybe not my way of thinking but definitely my view of the world in a way that changed how I lie my life. I used to be an idealist thinking that we could achieve some lofty goal of human accomplishment during my lifetime (for instance, an end to wars of commerce) but now I realize that we may not realize that goal ever.

So, effectively this book freed me from fighting windmills and freed my resources to try to improve the lives of those directly around me instead of on a larger scale. The effects have been pretty dramatic.

I completely agree. One of those books which was in some passages extremely hard (or even painful) to read is "Thou shall prosper" from Daniel Lipman, a (right wing) Rabbi! It changed the way I look at business. Some arguments convinced me, others I still can't accept. But it showed me that axioms which seem counter-intuitive to me can build a very practical world view.

Another book which is rather on the extreme side is Eckart Tolle's "The Power of now!". Again, I sometimes couldn't stand his opinion. For example whenever he quotes Jesus and explains that most people get it wrong but in fact it would be like this or that.

But the book showed me that I was worrying and thinking way too much and that this is at best useless and sometimes even dangerous.

Often books don't even tell you something new. And I think even this is worthwhile as long as the author explains what you already know in a very different way.

Heinlein: He presents a characterization (or characterizations), but some of his core points soak in over time, as one gains one's own life experience.

Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance": For letting me know I was/am not alone (even in my alone-ness).

Upon reflection, I guess these books haven't changed my way of thinking. But they've influenced them. Perhaps Heinlein helped me to change from approaching the world as it was presented to me to approaching it as I actually saw and see it. Pirsig helped me recognize and... formalize[1], at least for myself, some of my thoughts on quality.

Emily Dickinson: Less really can be more. So much more.

EDIT: Re [1], perhaps "explore" would be a better word.

Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris. My life was never the same again.

Care to elaborate? I read it too and it really inspired my but I just can't seem to pull off a successful muse.

Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. It changed the way I think about sanity and insanity, my model of the mind and motivational forces, the "big-picture" view of economics, how government works, how psychiatry works, and the way media affects us.

IMO it's treatment of desire (from a negative (lack) to a positive (thought production machine); relationship of desired object to its platonic object desire; how desire is generated) is a great framework for advertising and product development.

The Game - I never became a PUA per say, but it helped me a lot in dealing with co-workers, team members, investors, customers, and random people I come across every day.

"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. It taught me a lot about thinking about not just patterns, but metapatterns and metametapatterns.

"The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose. A truly brilliant and eminent mathematician/physicist boldly stepping up to grapple with the profound challenge of understanding how math, mind, and physics intertwine. Penrose's commentary on the role of entropy in cosmology transformed how I understand reality.

Few of them are: - I am OK you are OK, Thomas Harris (not sure) - Fountain Head, Ayn Rand - How to win friends .. - Lateral Thinking, Bono

Vedanta books - so many good authors all saying the same thing

Art of Happiness - Dalai Lama

Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach

Physics problems - Irodov

Seven Mysteries of Life - Guy Murchie

The Facebook Effect

It's real, it's true, it's my version of Cinderella story. I've read many motivational books, they're good, but Facebook Effect conveyed the idea of possibility to me, and I love it.

Change your thinking by Sarah Edelman

http://shop.abc.net.au/browse/product.asp?productid=162469

No, seriously.

Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, by Ayn Rand.

To a lesser extent, The Double Helix, by James D. Watson.

The Biology of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton The Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand The Attractor Factor by Joe Vitale The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Fountainhead

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" by Ayn Rand

Other books that influence how I build software:

"The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts" by Harry Binswanger, "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand, "The Autobiography of an Idea" by Louis H. Sullivan, "Reason and Analysis" by Brand Blanshard

My favorite science fiction story is "The Tactics of Mistake" by Gordon R. Dickson.

A few great biographies: "The Man Behind The Microchip" by Leslie Berlin, "iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It" by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith, and "Just One More Thing" by Peter Falk.

Books that sharpened my thinking: "An Introduction to Logic" by H.W.B. Joseph, everything written by Ayn Rand, "On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle" by Franz Brentano, and the works of Aristotle.

Demian - Hesse

Narcissus and Goldmund - Hesse

Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl

Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich

The Pragmatic Programmer

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