Book reviews

I learned from this book that becoming good at something is not a matter of doing it once; it is a lifestyle. We are what we do, and everyday, we perform little decisions that add up, and ended up defining if we had a good day, a good week, a good month, a good year, and a good life.  It all comes down to having good habits.

How do we manage to maintain good habits? We have to  make them easy, attractive, satisfying, and make bad habits difficult to do.
For example, let’s say you are trying to run 5 minutes per day. If you have to wake up, go find your shoes in the closet, shower, choose clothes, and figure out a running track, the chances of actually going for a run will become dim. However, if you prepare everything the night before, including the shoes, clothes, and running track, all you have to do is wake up and go for it; it will be much easier to maintain it.

As the title says, this book presents 7 habits to become effective and make the most out of life. 
The first three habits are private:
1. Be proactive: Don’t just complain about things that are not going your way. Take action, email that person, try things. 
2. Begin with the end in mind: All things you do should have a purpose. Why are you going to school? Why do you want this friendship? 3. Put first things first: While you may have multiple things to do, your time is limited, so it is important to learn which tasks are more important and should be tackled first. 

The next three habits are public:
4. Seek first to understand: then to be understood: People may disagree with you and hurt you, but often it is because they are hurting themselves. Learning how to understand people and listening will help you find more effective ways to deal with conflict and maintain relations. 
5.Synergize: Often in life, people work best together when they want to achieve a certain goal, instead of working individually. In a group, it is important to hold values of trust and communication if they want to achieve maximum synergy and achieve their goals. 
 6. Think win-win: Every situation, good or bad, is an opportunity to win something. Did you email a professor and you got the internship? Great, you won! Did you not get it? This is an opportunity to improve your email, CV, or communication skills. 

The last habit goes beyond all habits:
7. “Sharpen the saw” : You need to constantly assess yourself and see how you are doing in every habit. Maybe while you are working on one, you forget about another one. The success of this model depends on your ability to self-assess yourself with kind candor and optimism, to ensure you are becoming the better version of yourself.  

This work is an ode to productivity and suggests that we should be disciplined and smart about how we approach working. Instead of the usual mix of attempting an assignment and going off to social media every 15 minutes, we should aspire to perform deep work; uninterrupted focus towards a specific task while maintaining a “state of flow”. This allows to really understand and solve the problem at hand efficiently. Deep work is valuable, rare and meaningful in our society. Some of the tips suggested in this book are to  embrace boredom, quit social media, and learn to recognize differences between shallow tasks and deep tasks.

The goal of this book was to present the emotional ingredients required for business success, from the point of view of Gary Vaynerchuk.  In the last half of the book, the reader is given multiple scenarios showing how to leverage the emotional ingrediets.

The ingredients are:

1. Gratitude
2. Self-awareness
3. Accountability
4. Optimism
5. Empathy
6. Kindness
7. Tenacity
8. Curiosity
9. Patience
10. Conviction
11. Humility
12. Ambition
13.  (12 and 1/2) Kind Candor

This was an interesting read. This book starts by defining what is flirting and follows with valuable insights on how to become a good flirter. Some of the topics touched are selling yourself, choosing the right moment, using the right words, reading the other person cues, making them feel good, recognizing personal biases, etc. 

This is the very inspirational story of David Goggins. What I learned from this is that there is a lot of untapped potential in the human mind that can be unleashed by accepting the hardships of life and taking full responsability of your life and actions instead of blaming your misfortunes on external factors. Just like lifting heavy weights create calluses in your hands, you can also “callous your mind” by pushing yourself. As David Goggings would say it himself, stay hard, stay in the fight.

This book is a collection of essays that introduce the Zen perspective of the world. The teachings revolve around accepting life as it is and living harmoniously. 

This book is a biography of Elon Musk. It begins with the roots of the Musk family in South Africa and tells the story of Elon Musk’s youth, immigration to Canada and accension to become one of the most important people in history. Very inspiring for entrepreneurship-minded people.

This books is about the concept of flow, a state of consciousness where individuals feel completely absorbed in an activity, lose track of time, and feel a sense of control and mastery. The author argues that a state of flow is a key source of happiness and fulfillment in life and that it can be achieved through manual or creative work. One way to achieve it is to find an activity that is challenging enough so that it is not boring, but also not too challenging that it becomes anxiety inducing. I believe that becoming cognizant of different methods to achieve a state of flow may help you maintain inspiration and a good workflow without getting burned out.

This is an excellent book that simplifies cognitive processes into two systems: System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and automatic, and System 2, which is slower, more deliberate, and more effortful. Roughly speaking System 1 is unconscious and is based on simplied versions of real life problems and heuristics,while System 2 is more concious and thorough. The author argues that the brain often chooses System 1 to save energy and time when making decisions, but that this often leads to biases and errors. Overall, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” provides a fascinating exploration of the cognitive biases and errors that can affect our thinking and decision-making. By understanding these biases, we can work to correct for them and make more accurate, informed decisions; a great argument as to why we should consider being skeptical, even of ourselves!

This is one of the most mind-expanding books I have ever read. The book basically talks about the relation between math, art, music, language,  and consciousness. It also presents the limitations formal systems, through the incompleteness theorem by Godel, and discusses recursion and how “strange loops” or self-reference might be involved in what we experience as consciousness. The book even has a chapter about artificial intelligence and the limits of creativity and intelligence. A very thought-provoking piece of literature that made increased my sense of appreciation for mathematics, language, art, and A.I. technology