Some popular self help books
dailyjag.com
dailyjag.com
I don't think many lives are changed by self-help books. People who are actively trying to change their lives often read self-help books, and then misattribute any positive result to the book. Then they recommend the book to others, and it's either mindless blather, or common-sense tropes wrapped in a bow, or something that reinforces a decision they've already made. Someone decides they need to focus on something, and then reads a book about it while they're focused on it. They already changed their life before they read the book, by making the decision to change.
No one is changed by a religious text if they are already a religious person who largely agrees with the philosophy. No one changes their diet if they haven't already made a decision to eat healthier. No one GETS.RICH.QUICK if they weren't already entrepreneurial.
Yeah, maybe these books impacted people in some way. But they were already 99% of the way there. Recommending them to someone who isn't also 99% of the way there isn't going to change a thing.
The older I get the more obvious it is that there are no new ideas, there's just new branding.
But I'm the first to acknowledge that these kind of things are seldom found in such self-help books. Especially not in these get rich kind of stuff. I completely lost interest in this gossip.
But these books changed my mindset. Let me share some insights from these books:
1) Fastlane Millionaire Told me that if I want to be a "Millionaire" then it's highly unlikely I will be one by working for others (a job) unless my job is super high paying. Also by having a job I am playing an almost no risk and less reward game. Instead if I just increase the risk profile lil bit my rewards will be must more increased. It's hard to explain everything in 2 lines, hence this books is number 1.
2) Creativity Inc How can creativity be nurtured and promoted.
3) Range I am one of those people who like to do multiple things and mostly mix my different passions and make something new.
6) The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau Startups don't need to be started with a lot of money. People are making it big.
7) Originals by Adam Grant Lessons from others that it is okay to think differently and it is okay to do things others might tell you not to.
These are some lessons I owe to these books.
* How To Develop Your Thinking Ability by Ken Keyes Jr. It's out of print now, but easy to find a copy. It condenses down a lot of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics into an easy to digest format.
* The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. Also quite an old book, mentions a lot of similar ideas to Psychocybernetics (essentially the queen or king of all self-help books: most other ones just re-iterate the ideas in this one). It discusses how the thinking mind gets in the way of true excellence. I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from entering into meditative jhana.
* Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. While certainly filled with some questionable ideas, this absolutely broke my neat model of objective reality into tiny little pieces in high school. It set off a journey of self-exploration.
While some of the books in this list are good, everyone in silicon valley talks about a lot of those books nonstop. You'll understand the language SV folks use to talk about ideas, but you won't offer much else in the way of a unique perspective. A journey of reading needs to be self-lead.
Can you elaborate on this please? I've read The Inner Game of Tennis and I'm familiar with the (samatha) jhanas (and somewhat experienced as well). Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana, etc?
Yeah, pretty much. It primed me to pay a lot more attention to the judging mind particularly during sits (and really made me aware how much doubt as a hindrance disrupts my practice). While retrospectively it’s sort of obvious, I mainly have learned meditation through reading, so if an instruction isn’t phrased the right way I’ve noticed I miss it.
There's limited time in life. A thread like this would be fun if people said a bit about why a certain book is absolutely worth reading...
“Self-made millionaire” is not a thing. If you start from a premise that believes this is a possible concept, you’re just self-deluded selling snake oil.
The Millionaire Fastlane is the same old scam as the rest of them. Its self-aggrandizing author can believe he knows some psychological focus principles that unlock chances of wealth, but it’s just ego/narcissism. He just got lucky, in a cosmic sense (being born white in modern America) and in specific business opportunities. For every one MJ Demarco there are a million people with same mindset, same grit, same determination, same talent, same attitude etc who got nothing. It’s all just plinko.
If someone is reading 'books on how to get rich' then they're not looking to get mega-yacht wealthy. They're looking for financial security.
by William Braxton Irvine
That changed the way I thought about money very early on by focusing on defining assets purely as things that generate money for you and not “things you own.”
Ex. Your house is not an asset, a house that you rent to a tenant is, etc.
The goal of the book was to reiterate the idea that creating income generating assets will allow you to exit the workforce. No other type of asset defined by other terms would do so.
It had a big focus on real estate or investing in small stable, we’ll establish business models like gas stations, etc but in our field it could easily apply to stable side projects too.
Very cash flow oriented.
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> This book explores scientific facts that imply that the impact of the decision taken is dependent on their timing.
I'm skeptical whenever a self help book talks about "scientific facts" as it relates to psychological research. Especially lately as a lot of psychology experiments are undergoing a crisis of reproducibility. I recall some oft-repeated idea that we have a limited willpower gas tank that is depleted by every decision we make in a day, which was based on a cookie experiment that I read was recently reproduced to show an opposite result.
In any case the use of the word "fact" seems strong but perhaps the book addresses this.
Sure, it's thesis is practicable and generalizable, but it's more of a pop-psych book.
That said, I'd recommend Range as a great book to read on a flight or at the beach (whenever those return). The thesis is pretty easy to grok. The chapters that give examples towards the thesis are entertaining and memorable. The section on the orphan musical geniuses is very good.
It's a great book, just not self-help.
In it, he set out a fairly useful exercise for me, called "The mini-saga" (I don't think he originated the idea).
The goal is to write a story in exactly fifty words (not characters).
It was an enjoyable exercise.
I always like the story that was attributed to Hemingway, that the shortest story ever told was "For sale, baby shoes, never worn."
P.S. I chose a really bad day to move plugins, update site etc and that's why some of you were seeing the 502 errors. Sorry about that.
https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
Also
> Continual upskilling is critical for accelerating your career progression. However, the time constraint that corporate employment entail tends to spare limited time for you to improve your skillset.
Who writes like this? "Upskilling?" C'mon
The path of getting things done leads to nowhere.
One thing is to accept that not all items on various lists will be finished. The book explicitly says this is the case and recommends to remove items if they have not been done after a few weeks. If one can do this without much or any negative emotion I do not see this downside.
Would you like a list of the self-help books that got me to my three commas?
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