Content tagged with "psychology"

A good discussion about our hidden motives in all sorts of cognitive arenas like art, religion, politics, etc. We spend most of lives lying to ourselves about why we do things. Their thoughts on healthcare are interesting. Namely, we over-user health care because we take comfort in the idea that…

This is an interesting look about all the ways we think and process information other than the neurons and synapses in our brains. To be fair, we don’t really think outside the brain, but external stimuli help us process information in ways we don’t often realize. Each chapter covers a way think:…

Enormously entertaining book about the Beanie Baby craze of the mid and late 90s. The book goes deep into Ty Warner’s backstory. He’s the founder of the company that bears his first name. He’s a man who spent his entire career in “plush,” which is the industry term for stuffed animals. Warner is an…

I didn’t write a “review” of this book, but I wrote an article about it for Boing Boing: The long, slow death of our watering holes

A book about how smart people are sometimes very stupid. Sometimes, we can be so smart and analytical that we outsmart ourselves, lose sight of the forest for the trees, and come full-circle back to stupid. One example is Arthur Conan-Doyle, the nominally brilliant author of Sherlock Holmes. He was…

This is the “business” version of Klein’s more academic “sources of power.” A good book, but a lot to absorb. The key takeaway: map potential decision points, and role-play and practice scenarios.

The core point of this book is fantastic and wonderful: we are creatures of growth, and if we approach our lives with the mindset that we can change and are not fixed, then it will have a huge impact on our development and potential. That’s it – you could have written that in a blog post. But the…

This is a book about behavioral economics – why humans make the choices they do, and how they can be persuaded to make other choices. Well, not “persuaded” so much, but rather – wait for it – nudged. A “nudge” is a change to how a choice is framed or presented that causes people to pick an option…

I didn’t get this book for about the first third of it. Then I figured out what it was all about – It’s about all the hidden things in life that we ignore from day to day. Where our food comes from, where are energy comes from, where our garbage grows, what’s in outer space, etc. We live in a…

The value of this book depends on how much faith you place in the Enneagram, an ancient method of categorizing personalities into nine different types. The book is wonderfully well-written, but it suffers from two core problems. First, since we’re all one type , then about 80% of the book won’t be…

The result of years of research about decision making. Spoiler: we rarely compare alternative paths of action. Instead, we seize on something we think will work, then evaluate that. If we decide it’s unworkable, then we move on to the next obvious option, and down the list.

This is a book about Do Gooders – people who are compelled to help other people, often to a fault. The book is a series of stories about these people. These are people that sacrifice their lives, their happiness, to make life better for others. The book is a study in some people’s inability to…

Meh. I just didn’t get most of this. I feel like this is a self-help book for people who don’t read many self-help books because a lot of it is obvious. Manson seems to be trying to play the “get real” card. He basically says that life is too short to care about unimportant things, so you have to…

Fascinating, but a bit of a slog to get through. Gets tedious towards the end. Key takeaway: you’re not good at thinking, you’re just good at thinking that you’re good at thinking.

This is one of those books which launches with a clear premise and then loses its way. The book is purportedly about “triggers,” things in the environment that get in the way of you changing as a person. Unfortunately, about halfway through, it became a standard-issue self-improvement book, and…

This book explains “The Romantic Lie,” which is a theory proposed by Rene Girard. It says that we’re fooling ourselves when we think we want something just because we do – we actually only want things because we’ve been programmed by other’s to want them. This is what’s known as “mimetic desire,” or…

Nice reading, but I don’t know that I learned anything particularly new. She makes a case for taking time away from work, and has chapters about things you can do and why they matter, but I’m not sure I’m any better off for having read it.