Ask HN: What books have you read that have changed your life?
Have you read any books that you consider to have changed the course of your life or radically altered your way of thinking?
On the "business side", I'd say Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany also had a marked impact on my thinking.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins also helped reform my world-view in certain areas. Specifically it helped dispel any lingering credibility that I might have assigned to the "irreducible complexity" argument.
Another would be Report from Engine Co 82 by Dennis Smith. That book (along with watching Emergency! on TV) as a kid had a direct impact in terms of steering me towards the fire service, where I eventually served 10+ years as volunteer firefighter with three different departments in NC.
No one cares about how you live your life. Do your thing. Don't take anything personally. The good or the bad.
The Art of Not Giving a Fuck says some of the same thing, unfortunately it comes out of the mouth of a born rich kid who never held a real job. He gets upset in his own book about not everyone loving his "advice".
This stuff goes back to Earl Nightingale. If your spending all day worried about what other people think of you, imagining some judgement that doesn't actually exist, you'll accomplish nothing.
We become what we think about. If you spend your free time learning useful skills versus gossiping about people you don't even know, your life is going to be much better.
The Power of Now has an interesting twist on this concept. Well worth the 15$ I spent on the audio book.
This 1-star rating represents best my feeling about the book and the author (I had been a reader of Manson from his PUA days before he, seeing the decline of the PUA industry, reinvented himself as a lifestyle guru):
"I've never been more disappointed by a book. The constant generalizations. The pretentious tone of it all. The lack of any substance. Heres a synopsis, privileged guy uses his atypical life experience to tell you to care less about certain things and care more about other things you already know you should care about. Don't waste your time or money."
The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt (about the impact of the Roman poet Lucretius' poem On The Nature of Things--everything from the idea of the atom, Botticelli's Venus on the Half Shell to why Thomas Jefferson put "the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence--and much more)
The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone (about David Fairchild, who introduced 10,000 plants to U.S. agriculture at the turn of the 20th century, most of the groceries we buy today)
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf (a biography of Alexander von Humboldt)
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
It really changed how I try to approach disagreements. I find myself rereading it periodically and trying to implement more and more of the suggestions.
I've read a lot of these types of self-reflection books now, and I like this one because of its spectacular density: many of the commitments could be their own book. For example, a few of them directly relate to NVC - nonviolent communication, others on processing and dealing with emotions in a healthy way, others with recognizing and separating stories and narratives from base reality, etc.
Also I like that this book is very actionable, very hands-on.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Helped me understand how to change how I look at my perception of things that distress me.
Together these two are two tools I use every day to create positive change in my life and accomplish my goals
On a personal perspective, "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies". It helped me to understand what was happening to me on a personal crisis. This stuff should be taught in schools.
* The INTP: Personality, Careers, Relationships, & the Quest for Truth and Meaning. This book helped me understand my own journey in life.
* How to Win Friends and Influence People. A little cliche, but reading this book drove me to reflect on what a pedantic jerk I was being sometimes.
Non-fic
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman
I used to be a member of a cult, and toward the end of that experience, I laughed when I realized I had read this book more than my cult's holy texts. We used to ask each other how many times we'd read those books, and I'd always think, "don't ask me about Feynman," as his experiences really get at the analytical-intuitive mind and takes it to a spiritual level that's not really allowable or approachable from within a typical spiritual text. I still think this is a pretty remarkable feat.
- Alone in the Ocean by Slava Kurilov
Something of the opposite of Feynman's book above, this is a very spiritual feelings-oriented book but it's grounded in a very real experience--the author defected from the USSR by jumping off an official "cruise to nowhere" ship and swimming to the Philippines. It helped me consider the concept of personal freedom and how much it overlaps with feelings for some people, long before it overlaps with objective logic. I learned that my feelings can be an important early-alert system, far from an unintelligible mush.
- Around the World on a Bicycle by Thomas Stevens
This book got me back into cycling exploration after a long hiatus.
- The Mind Map Book by Tony Buzan
I can't put a number on how many helpful and even liberating mind maps I created since buying this book in 1996 or so. I eventually spun off my own system that's similar but with various extensions.
Fiction
- The Aubrey-Maturin Series by Patrick O'Brian
Reading this series I realized how much depth, detail, and subtlety can really do for a work. It blew me away. Previously I had been of the mind that it was best for an author to act something like a professional communication robot, serving the reader and relentlessly cutting away any fat. But I think that kind of reverses itself if you are able to get at the human aspect, the us-fascination of your work--once it's there, it's probably more fun for both writer and reader to celebrate it.
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
While reading, I was excited and horrified to learn that my psychology overlaps with this fictional kid's psychology in more ways than it was comfortable to admit. I decided to hold onto that, and explore it. It helped me open up a world of functionality I now use over and over in journaling and problem-solving.
- Watchmen, writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins
Wow--what _do_ you do, how do you act, what is your response in this general kind of a situation? It's an incredible setup for such a question, one in which the ideal situation has ended up on its head, completely upside down with the good looking totally bad, and the totally bad coming out even worse than before.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
The Dispossessed
Deep Work