Ask HN: What book(s) changed your life? |
Ask HN: What book(s) changed your life? |
Before that I'd avoid conflicts, especially by more aggressive people. After reading that book, I started actively finding ways do deal with conflicts. A good deal of the book is not simply 'combat' but also dealing with starting conflicts, extended conflict, unconventional strategies, when to withdraw, and so on.
It is an almost stream-of-consciousness dissection of the social, cultural, geographic, and hydrologic history of an area that most would write-off as desert wasteland. It gave me a portal into the complexity of an ordinary place and how it is viewed through the lens of a genius.
The Places In Between - Rory Stewart
An introduction to how radically different and complex societies outside-the-fold of the Western world can be, and how ancient many of their traditions and way of life are. It also reminded me that real adventure necessitates risk.
The Great War for Civilisation - Robert Fisk
Taught me that whatever I know about foreign conflict, I know nothing about foreign conflict.
The Best and the Brightest - David Halberstam
Provides a template for how the US government embarks upon adventures abroad. Taught me how stupid tremendously smart people can be when you get them all together in one room.
It also helps massively to figure out the goal first, because most of the time the goal is hidden in management speak or cryptic customer feedback due to language barriers or legal ones.
I was on the verge of writing my own plugin for that. Then I took a step back, took a deep breath, and realised that my goal was to write faster blog posts, not to write my own f*cking plugin. So I googled for a bit and found an existing plugin and modified it to my likings, making it do exactly what I wanted to achieve.
Engineers are often too fixated on building, and not explicit enough about what problem they are solving. They just want to build shit because it's fun, but often this is not optimal.
2.Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan: Made me love biology
3.Brief History of Time: Increased interest and self confidence in Science.
4. Phantoms in the Brain : How complex problems can be solved by out of the box thinking.
I came across it aged about 19. He speaks about 10,000 things I'd experienced but assumed couldn't be put into words. And he's always very inspirational. I read in him daily for 10 years or so, this and his other writings, and still never go long without, although by now it's in my blood. John Jay Chapman said it well:
It is nothing for any man sitting in his chair to be overcome with the sense of the immediacy of life, to feel the spur of courage, the victory of good over evil, the value, now and forever, of all great-hearted endeavor. Such moments come to us all. But for a man to sit in his chair and write what shall call up these forces in the bosoms of others – that is desert, that is greatness. To do this was the gift of Emerson. The whole earth is enriched by every moment of converse with him. The shows and shams of life become transparent, the lost kingdoms are brought back, the shutters of the spirit are opened, and provinces and realms of our own existence lie gleaming before us.
This is a very short book, but it's an introduction to systems involving people, not just engineering.
They both turn my world upside down and yet, they keep me grounded.
I got it at a bookstore one day because the shelf note on it from one of the staff members made it seem interesting, didn't really know what I was getting into.
Apparently I had bought a book full of real Bolshevik philosophy essays from a Hungarian "Orthodox Marxist" philosopher, like what Zero to One would be in the USSR.
It was written in the 1920s before the whole Soviet project imploded, and what was fascinating about it for me was how precise it tried to be about the nature of how human processes and how they change. In hindsight, we know that the Soviet vision was bound by a ton of contradictions, but this book was like an inside view of a part of history I didn't really know much about, and kinda made me realize how easy it is to find some new wrinkle to history you had never considered before. Got me reading a lot more interesting histories of places.
Here's an excerpt from the book, the whole thing and all the essays are actually free online. On "Orthodox Marxism" (something I didn't even know could be classified that way lol)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthod...
Being an extravert the book inspired me on how to get energy from my inner world of ideas and images during quarantine. Beautiful metaphors and philosophical inquiries into values.
Going through life you naturally learn more and more about dealing with people and situations, but reading about the why is fascinating and definitely gives you a fresh perspective on things.