Books

A personal summary of books I have ready and/or am reading. I started doing this in the beginning of 2024. I may later add some books that I read prior.

How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day

Author: Arnold Bennett
Reviewed on: 07 September 2024

Most people go through life without putting much effort into their work or passions. They’re bored, unfulfilled, and wondering where the time went. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You have 24 hours a day, and you can use them to live a full, purposeful life.
The key is to make the most of your time. Don’t try to do too much at once, or you’ll burn out. Start small, be consistent, and allow time for accidents and human nature. Remember, you can’t waste time in advance, so make the most of it.
The typical person has a poor attitude towards their day, viewing it as something to get through. They’re not living, they’re just existing. Instead, focus on making the most of all 24 hours. Your mental faculties can handle continuous hard activity. When you are tired, switch the mental activity.
To make the most of your time, start by dedicating 90 minutes each evening to personal development. Use this time to cultivate your mind, focus on something important, and reflect on your day. Think deeply about what you’re reading or doing, and make connections to your life.
Don’t be too hard on yourself if you fail or struggle at first. The key is to start small and be consistent. With time and effort, you can develop the habits and mindset necessary to live a full and purposeful life.
It’s not about being perfect; it’s about making progress. Don’t compare yourself to others; compare yourself to who you were yesterday. And don’t be afraid to take breaks and rest – it’s essential for growth.
By following these principles, you can transform your life and make the most of your time. You’ll be more productive, more fulfilled, and more purposeful. So start today, and see where the journey takes you.

Habit

Author: William James
Reviewed on: 05 March 2024

William James was a philosopher who has written many books and essays. Habit is one of his essays and is available as a book which can be download for free from Google Books or archive.org since the copyright is expired. The book was written more than 100 years ago and is short and stays on point. The author talks about his mental model about habit — how it is formed, why is it difficult to form or break one, etc. He also explains why habits are more physical than just psychological in the sense that they are like grooves that guide our behavior subconsciously and this is what makes it hard to change them.

The best part of the book is that it does not beat around the bush and gets to the point right from the first sentence, which is: “When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits.”

Principles

Author: Ray Dalio
Reviewed on: 05 March 2024

In a nutshell, I abandoned readying this book after a couple of chapters.

I started reading this book and could not go past the first couple of chapters. I tried to pick it up again, but could not continue. Since I have heard good things about this book, I was expecting it to be gripping, but the style is not to my taste. It contains too many of personal anecdotes for the book to be useful, at least to me.

The 12 Week Year

Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months

Authors: Brian P. Moran, Michael Lennington
Reviewed on: 06 February 2024

In this book, the authors teach a method that they claim has helped companies, business people, sports people and others achieve great heights. At the core, this book is about compressing a year into 12 weeks, which allows us to accomplish in 3 months what we think is achievable in a year. And, the chances of success is higher than the typical one year thinking. Each day should be thought of as a compressed week, which is a mental trick to help us stay on plan. The system is layered and at the bottom is the long term vision. This is arrived at after deep contemplation and visualization of the desired future. Next is the 3 year vision which is based on the long term vision, and finally, the 12 week plan which is based on the 3 year vision. The vision helps us pull through patches of low motivation. The system includes 3 principles and 5 tactics, as follows:

Principles

Accountability: A willingness to own actions and results, regardless of circumstances
Commitment: A personal promise that you make to yourself
Greatness in the Moment: Each moment that you choose to do the things that you need to do to be great

Tactics

Vision: A clear picture of the future
Planning: Actions needed to achieve the vision
Process Control: Align daily actions with your plan
Measurement: Lead and lag indicators that provide feedback
Time Use: Using your time with clear intention

I think this system should work better than simply relying on motivation to accomplish goals.

Ultralearning

Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate your career

Author: Scott H. Young
Reviewed on: 21 January 2024

The author never went to MIT but wanted to learn the CS curriculum of MIT and took up the challenge of teaching himself the entire course in one year, and successfully completed it. He also learned new languages like French and South Korean in three months each and was able to comfortably talk to native speakers of these languages. This book is about developing the ability to learn hard things in a short span of time. Since projects can be vastly different, the author argues that the best way to learn ultralearning is to internalize a set of guiding principles (and not a set of fixed steps), and those are:

Metalearing: first draw a map
Focus: sharpen your knife
Directness: go straight ahead
Drill: attack your weakest point
Retrieval: Test to learn
Feedback: Don’t dodge the punches
Retention: Don’t fill a leaky bucket
Intuition: Dig deep before building up
Experimentation: Explore outside your comfort zone

Once these principles are internalized, one can pick up a project of their choice, whether it is learning a new programming language, learning carpentry, learning to play chess etc. and learn that skill in a short time. This can be done at work to learn new skills or outside of work for hobbies. Useful for students and professionals alike. I read the book quickly in two days, and will now give it another pass at a slow and deliberate speed.

The Courage to Be Disliked

How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness

Authors: Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga
Reviewed on: 16 January 2024

The Courage to Be Disliked is about unlocking the power within yourself to be the person you truly want to be. It is based on the theories of Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology and is written as a conversation between a philosopher and a young man. While reading this book, I was constantly reminded of Bhagwad Geeta’s message about removing attachment. The book is written at a level that would work well for people in the late teens as well as for adults of any age. The lessons can be summarized as follows:

No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.
All problems are interpersonal relationship problems.
It’s not what one is born with but what use one makes of that equipment.
Deny the desire for recognition. It makes you unfree.
Do not live to satisfy the expectations of others.
Do not intervene in other people’s tasks and do not allow other people to intervene in your tasks.
You are not the center of the world.
Listen to the voice of the larger community. We belong to the community of universe.
Do not rebuke or praise. Encourage.
Remain in the present. Here and now.
Excessive self-consciousness stifles the self. Don’t affirm, but accept the self. Have confidence in others.
If one has a feeling of contribution, one will no longer have any need for recognition from others.
Community feeling: engage in self-acceptance, confidence in others, and contribution to others.
Possess the courage to be normal, and your looking at the world will change dramatically.
To shine a spotlight on here and now is to go about doing what one can do now, earnestly and conscientiously.

The above bullet points are cherry picked from the book in the hope that going through these points will help me recall the message of the book. But I realize that this is not a one-read book and needs to be read again and again in order to internalize the message.

Caffeine Blues

Waking up to the hidden dangers of America’s #1 drug

Author: Stephen Cherniske
Reviewed: 6 January 2024

Over the years, I would stumble upon claims that caffeine and/or coffee have downsides which are underplayed by the media because of all the marketing money the interested corporations throw at spinning positive research about the benefits of coffee/caffeine. However, as some of those claims started to resonate with my personal experience, I wanted to learn more. I ended up reading this book because many coffee quitters pointed at this book as a good place to get all the information. The book is a good read and it deals with multiple aspects of caffeine harm from personal to political and environmental. This book convinced me to finally quit coffee, and the following summary of the book is what helped me make this call:

Caffeine can’t provide energy, only chemical stimulation, an induced emergency state that can lead to irritability, mood swings, and panic attacks.
Caffeine’s ultimate mood effect can be letdown, which can lead to depression and chronic fatigue.
Caffeine gives the illusion of heightened alertness by dilating pupils, quickening heart rate, and raising blood pressure. In fact caffeine does not increase overall mental activity.

Play Anything

The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

Author: Ian Bogost
Reviewed: 3 January 2024

This book is about developing an attitude of play in anything we do. The goal is to make our tasks and projects more engaging and fun, i.e. more fulfilling and rewarding as opposed to being pleasurable. The following two quotes from the book capture the message quite well.

Misery gives way to fun when you take an object , event, situation, or scenario that wasn’t designed for you, that isn’t concerned in the slightest for your experience of it, and then treat it as if it were.

And…

It is more productive to work with objects, people, and situations we encounter by using, understanding, and appreciating them for what they are rather than for how they make us feel about ourselves.

It became harder to proceed with the book after a couple of chapters, and the reviews on Goodreads echo this too. I eventually skimmed through the rest of the book and called it done. However, the core message is really compelling and worth adopting in terms of our general attitude towards things.