Author: Ren

I have some real mixed feelings on this book. The author, Amanda Palmer, is definitely not my type of person. She’s way too artsy for me and about as artsy as you can get. I can appreciate most art, but I certainly don’t live it and wouldn’t want to. She lives it. Her life is like a piece of art. Not one that I particularly appreciate; however, one good thing to come from this book is that I understand it quite a bit better. I feel like I understand street performers in a way I never did before.

Going into the book blind, having not known who Amanda Palmer was, I was hoping or expecting to find a guide on how to ask for things. Maybe about how to be more assertive and that sort of stuff. Perhaps the message would be told through life stories like The Art of Learning, which is a book I highly recommend, and I can accept anecdotal stories that teach lessons.

However, this book didn’t tackle the issue directly at all. The book is the story of the author’s life and a little bit about how asking fit in. I’ll give it credit for being interesting throughout, she’s lived quite a life. It was also emotional at times. However, I don’t really think I learned much of anything about the art of asking. I guess, just ask. That might be the sum total of the wisdom on that topic.

Okay, there might be a little bit more. There was a small discussion about why it works for some people and not for others. Asking is about building/continuing a relationship, it’s an exchange, it’s not just begging. A musician who has interacted with his fans will be much more likely to get what he asks for than someone who keeps himself separate from his fans.

In one part there was a discussion about being shameless. The author compared it to being fearless and how shameless is seen as bad, but fearless is seen as good and she didn’t understand why. Shame and fear are both negative, right? So why is lacking one bad and lacking the other good. I don’t think shame is bad. Doing shameful things is bad. Shame itself is an internal moral compass telling you that you’re doing something wrong. If you’re shameless, that compass is broken. Of course, fear isn’t all bad either. It usually is a warning of danger and being fearless is probably a sign that you’re not very bright or that you don’t value your own life. Neither is actually good, but I’d still put fearless as better than shameless.

In my circle of acquaintances, I would hesitantly recommend this book to Twitch streamers. I’ve known a few of them who have issues asking for money and they feel awkward taking the money their fans want to give them. This book may put them at ease a little bit more. It can help the streamers understand that it is an exchange and that exchange is a token of appreciation for what they’ve done.

Having said that, the book is all over the place. It doesn’t really follow a timeline and it doesn’t really stick to subjects very well either. In some ways, it feels like an editor really needed to go through this book and do some major re-arranging. However, the messiness does fit the author quite well and maybe it needs to be a messy book if it’s going to be about her life.

I’d also say that Neil Gaiman comes out of the book looking like a saint.

I must admit I was surprised by this book. I have quite a bit of time to listen to audio books and not nearly as much time to actually read, so I decided to give this one a try on audio even though I thought it would be a much better read. As it turns out, it makes for quite a nice audio book. This book is not about the nitty gritty of checklists and how to create them or whatever. Instead, it’s written by a surgeon and how and why he implemented it into his practice as well as working with the World Health Organization to get it implemented much more widely.

To put it simply, Checklists work. At least, they work if they’re formatted right for the goal they are trying to help accomplish. Engineers working on a building project might have an extremely detailed checklist that they slog through over the course of months or years to help safely and effectively build a building. Meanwhile, a Surgeon needs his checklist to be very brief. It should only check for the things it absolutely needs and are often missed. Things like making sure the patient gets his antibiotic within an hour before the surgery. Those little things that are so easy to overlook, but can be crucial.

The book itself talks through the process of how the author, Atul Gawande, came to use checklists. There are plenty of anecdotal stories in the book which made for good listening and then some relatively quick mentions of statistics that backed up the stories with success rates of using checklists. One function of the checklists in his book was actually to improve teamwork. The checklists themselves forced people to communicate better together in a team environment and helped create better teamwork overall.

The book doesn’t get too technical on checklists. The only spot that really seemed technical at all was when the author mentioned Do-Confirm versus Read-Do checklists. In Do-Confirm, you go through the process until you come to a defined pause point and then make sure you did the things. In a Read-Do, you read off each step along the way and perform the step, checking it off as you go. The situation should determine which type you use.

The author mostly focuses on surgery, which is his specialty, but also gets into engineering, aviation (where it really popularized), and even finance.

I don’t think this book will drastically change my life since I was already on board. I already use To-Do lists and Task lists extensively in my life, but I will look for more places to add these lists as he did indeed make a convincing case that they are valuable. Our world is simply too complex to rely on memory and habit alone, getting the process down to a list and following it will prevent many errors. If you don’t use checklists in your life, I’d recommend giving this book a try and see if it convinces you.

I was looking for a nice quick listen and I figured the next thing from Tony Robbins would fit the bill after the last two I listened to were so short. Whoops. This book was 23 hours long. It talked about a lot of medical breakthroughs to improve quality and quantity of life. It can be quite hopeful about the future (and present) of medical technology. I did find it interesting, although it was quite repetitive and I could certainly see other people tuning out after a short while.

I also worry that he’s pushing a bunch of products that he’s invested in. Tony freely admits that he’s invested in many of the technologies as he discusses them. So while what he’s saying about the various breakthroughs sound nice, he’s pushing things he stands to make money from. It feels particularly shady when he’s talking about supplements because it sounds like every other supplement pitch. He can say the science is there, but so do all the other ones. Maybe his are genuine, but I’d like to see independent studies on them.

Getting past that, there is a lot of cool technology discussed. Stem cell research is very interesting and there’s a lot of good anecdotal evidence, including for Tony himself. There’s also potential in some odd things like using electricity, hijacking your own immune system, 3D printing, and maybe even things like acupuncture. There’s also plenty of more normal advances in technology, exercise, and drugs. We get a huge overview of the future of medicine and it is very hopeful.

One thing I want after listening to the book is a full body MRI. It would be nice to get one and check my whole body for solid tumors or possibly other ailments. The grail blood test is also interesting as it also checks for a bunch of types of cancer. If you can catch those cancers early, your ability to treat it is much better. Unfortunately, both those things are not cheap to get, but hopefully prices will drop over time. For now, either be rich or maybe see if your health insurance will handle it for you (it’s not usually covered).

The book also ended by playing to Tony’s strength talking about the psychological side. It includes things like the placebo effect and how just having a good mindset can help with certain things. It was a nice uplifting section although it too seemed like a bit of a sales pitch, but this time for his seminars.

I don’t really feel like a book is the right format for the type of information that was presented. The information is changing fast as new studies are done and some of the things that are being promoted in the book may already have failed newer trials. It’s still a reasonably good overview, but it was way too long and a lot of it won’t be relevant in a decade. So I’d generally shy away from this book unless you’re reading this within the next couple years and you’ve got a strong interest in the future of medical technology.

This one is a classic and I’d say for good reason. A whole lot of the advice sounds like common sense. Yes, good. Sometimes putting the obvious to paper and calling it a book is a good idea. It reinforces what we should already know and probably aren’t doing very well.

I know that I don’t do the stuff in the book nearly enough even though I think it’s mostly common sense. I’d also suspect that a lot of the information wasn’t totally common sense when it was written and only became common sense after this information entered the zeitgeist.

The basic message of the book might as well be “be a kind and tolerant person”. Be interested in people and listen to them. Simple stuff. However, it also has some good ideas I hadn’t really heard before. One was to get someone saying “yes yes” immediately. If you can get them agreeing with you, then they’ll want to keep agreeing with you. If you immediately get into the disagreement, they’re going to get stubborn. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or if you “win” the argument, you’re still going to lose. Yeah, I make that mistake way too much.

It also had some ideas on how to criticize when necessary. Generally, don’t be too direct about it. I’d also suspect the “compliment sandwich” probably started with this book, although it’s missing the last piece of bread.

I’d certainly recommend reading the book. It’s not too long and it’s mostly a bit of advice followed by a few anecdotes for each idea. It’s a very easy read, although the author references a lot of people from the late 1800s and early 1900s that a less educated person might not know. However, I don’t think it’s important to know that much about the characters other than that they are successful people… presidents and business leaders.

Honestly, this book should probably be in school curriculums. Nice short chapters that would be good for discussion. The only thing I question on this book is that it doesn’t address the existence of sociopaths. It assumes the best of people and that they aren’t going to take advantage of your kindness and generosity. If it had an updated version that talked about how to spot out sociopaths and how to deal with them, it would be even better… although I don’t think it’d fit the general feel of the book.

Perhaps a modern rewrite of the book would be in order, but this one is a classic that should be read as is.

This book is a bit hard for me to review. Once again, I listened to it as an audiobook, except I did it while doing delivery driving. So my mind was potentially distracted and I had to pause it a whole bunch. I also have a few mixed feelings on it.

To start with, the author Tara Brach seems a bit off to me. She’s the type of person who basically belonged to a Buddhist cult at one point in her life and is still an avid practitioner. It took a complete asshole of a spiritual leader to open her eyes enough to leave the cult, but she didn’t leave the nonsense behind. This book is pushing Buddhism and not just the practical parts of it, but also a lot of the spiritual stuff associated with it.

Having said that, I do think Buddhism has some practical wisdom to impart. Even as a non-religious man, I can see value in Buddhism and this book brings some of it to the forefront. The book has some nice concepts that are quite simple, like taking a “pause”. Just stop and feel what you’re feeling. Yes. Good advice and a lot of people would benefit from it rather than being reactive assholes. I probably could have prevented a few of my more shameful moments in life by taking a pause first.

Another interesting concept is the idea of inviting in your negative thoughts. Don’t pretend they don’t exist and don’t try to block them out. Accept that you have them. I had seen this concept before in another book where it recommended giving your negative thoughts a name and then saying “hello (name)” to it when it comes. Radical Acceptance goes much deeper into that concept and I thought had reasonably practical advice on it.

As the book moves on, it does tend to get a bit repetitive as the author goes through a few cases of people she’s helped as a Psychologist over the years. The advice tends to be pretty similar and so a lot of the chapters start to sound very similar, but it could be useful for someone to get some concrete examples. Of course, there is an assumption that she’s not just making up these stories. Some of the comments that her clients made didn’t seem real to me. A lot of them fit a little too neatly into her philosophy and I’d suspect that she’s at least simplifying if not outright fabricating the stories.

Still, there are little useful nuggets even in the later chapters.

Overall, I’d recommend the book, but with some caveats. You need to be at least tolerant of spiritual nonsense to get to the real useful meat of the book and you need to accept that the author bought into Buddhism a lot too much. However, unlike The Power of Now author, I don’t think she’s trying to start a cult of her own. At least not too dangerous of one.

Ugh. I don’t remember where I saw this book as a recommendation, but I think it was more than one place. I listened to it on audiobook and I was not a fan. It has all the hallmarks of a “gardener” writing style. Just plant a bunch of seeds (characters and settings) and see what grows out of it. Of course, it has all the pitfalls of a gardener style without benefiting from the advantages.

The basic premise is to follow a family line from the start of the village of Macondo until the end of the line, multiple generations later. It’s not a terrible concept to work with. However, if I never hear the word Macondo or Buendia again, I’ll be happier. The Buendia family are a miserable bunch of unlikable idiots. The story tries to be grounded most of the time, but has ridiculous magic in it that goes beyond just prophecy and reading the cards. Harry Potter might as well have shown up.

At times, it does hit hard. The wars and the banana company were probably some of the more interesting parts. However, I just can’t get past the gardener style. It’s like a giant game of “and then”. It doesn’t seem like the author had any idea of what would come next with every word he put on the page. Just keep the words coming and hope it almost makes sense. Throw in some magic here and there. Bring back random characters that went away or bring in a totally new character because something needs to happen. Tie a guy to a tree for years and everyone just accepts it. It was like a bad soap opera.

All of the characters seemed like caricatures rather than real people. At least, I hope you don’t know anyone like the people in the story. They’re all crazy. The advantage of gardener writing is that it allows you to take a character in a situation and write what that character would do rather than force a character to get to some pre-planned plot point as in a more organized writing style. So the gardener style of writing can make characters feel real because they act exactly as an author imagines that real person would act.

This story did not benefit from that at all. Perhaps there’s a cultural difference between the author and me that is totally throwing me off, but I just don’t think real people are like the people in this story. They’re all ridiculously irrational and often petty, awful people for no real reason. I didn’t know what I was getting into with this book and I initially thought the founding male was mildly interesting with his obsession over technology from the gypsies. I thought the story had a chance following his run-ins with technology he didn’t understand and the attempts to understand it. It was almost noble, though quite misguided. Unfortunately, he was literally turned crazy and tied to a tree until his death.

So I didn’t feel like I had anyone worth rooting for. I didn’t feel like these characters were real people. I didn’t enjoy the magic sprinkled into what otherwise seemed like a grounded story. I don’t think the author had any idea where he was going or what he wanted to do with this book. He just kept writing until he decided to be done and wrapped it up.

So no, I do not recommend this book.

This book sounded like such a good idea. Distill the essence from hundreds of hours of podcasts with many different famous and successful people from various walks of life? Count me in. As I grabbed a copy of this book, I wondered why I hadn’t heard it referenced more often. I only heard of it from a random self-help YouTube channel in one video. It’s still reasonably recent, so it shouldn’t have totally gone out of the zeitgeist.

Having now read it, I understand. It’s not terrible, but the book is a huge missed opportunity. I can’t say that I listen to the Tim Ferris podcast, so maybe the information just isn’t there to work with, but I thought it would be a lot better than it turned out. One of the biggest problems is how little time he spends with each person. Some people are only given 1 or 2 kindle pages of information. There’s no real breakdown of what makes them tick. There’s very rarely anything to point to how they got successful. There’s also very few threads tying the book together.

The way he built the book with each person being a different chapter, I wish he did less chapters and delved a little deeper into each one. The longer profiles were usually much more interesting than the short ones. As I said, perhaps he just didn’t have interesting information to work with on some of them, but then they probably should have been cut and more time should have been given to people who had provided more interesting and in-depth information.

Alternatively, I think the book could have been drastically reformatted by concept. So, he could have had a chapter on Meditation and then gone through a whole bunch of different people and their takes on Meditation. Some might believe it needs to be done strictly, some more loosely, and some think it’s a total waste. Do a little compare and contrast between the various guests and their takes on Meditation. That could be interesting. Same for things like Nutrition. Get the perspectives of a famous Vegan and a Carnivore and compare what they have to say. Does their information stand up to scrutiny?

The book definitely did not live up to its potential. It could have used a major reformat or simply spent more time on each person. What we got instead felt very shallow most of the time and honestly, somewhat dangerous when it comes to some of his Drug advice. I’d be very skeptical of his diet and exercise information as well. Sometimes a person can be really strong/fit despite doing some really ineffective things. Like, I know a guy who is a huge proponent of the carnivore diet. He’s also very fit and he credits that diet. However, I’d suspect he could eat a much more balanced meal and still be that outwardly fit if he ate the same number of calories and worked out as much.

So, it’s a fine book to read, but I don’t think you’re going to get as much out of it as the concept would have you believe. I’d also be very skeptical of a lot of the advice in the book.

I liked this book. It was a nice exploration of how introverts can perform well in the modern world where a lot of extroverted qualities are emphasized. Our world, especially the western one has an Extrovert Ideal where extroverted qualities are desired and rewarded. However, the author would argue it really shouldn’t be that way.

My best quick summary is that extroverts tend to get more credit, but introverts tend to get better results. That’s not to crap on extroverts completely, there are plenty of good qualities and introverts can and should learn some extroverted traits when needed.

A smart introvert should learn how to manage within the world around them and that may mean going outside of their comfort zone. However, it also means setting yourself up for success by putting yourself in a position to succeed. An example would be taking a job that requires deep concentration rather than one that requires a ton of socialization.

Another interesting idea is that introverts are not necessarily against being social. Some introverts can be quite social, but only in limited settings, like one on one. Introverts actually tend to talk about deeper topics and don’t like small talk as much as extroverts do.

Another interesting observation from the book is that brainstorming sessions really don’t work. At least, they don’t work as well as giving each member some time to think on their own. No matter how you run the session, people will still be reticent to put out stupid ideas, so they’re less likely to share. It’s better to have each person make their own list of ideas and then compare them at the end. You’ll end up with more ideas overall, even after accounting for repeats.

So I’d say this book is worth reading (or listening to, as I did). I do think it validates some of my feelings as an introvert. At a minimum, it tells me that it’s okay and there’s nothing wrong with being one. At a best, it actually gives some strategies for dealing with the limitations of being one. That’s a nice mix overall.

This book was recommended by Mark Manson in the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. He seems pretty down to Earth, so a recommendation from him sounded interesting. Oh boy was I wrong.

Here’s the good news, you can read the Wikipedia Summary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death) of the book and it’s good. It has some valuable ideas. Things like the causa sui project make sense to me. Basically, the causa sui is your immortality project, what you will leave behind when you die. I’d say it’s a useful concept and helps you understand why people do some of the things that they do.

Unfortunately, the book spends an inordinate amount of time trying to refute Freud and other psychoanalysts and philosophers. The author, Ernest Becker, really seems to have it out for Freud. Fair enough, Freud’s ideas seemed really off from the first moment I heard them. It sounds like Freud himself had some serious issues and then tried to claim that all men have them, they’re just repressing them. It’s stupid, Becker points out that it’s wrong and then he keeps going and going and going.

I made the mistake of listening to this book as an audiobook and I found my mind wandering way too much. I’ve listened to plenty of other books in the same genre and I have very little issues with staying engaged and understanding what is being said. This book made my eyes glaze over just listening to it. When my mind wandered, I wasn’t even tempted to rewind a bit like I would in other books. I just wanted to get this one over with. Maybe I would have had a chance if I had read it rather than listening to it. If it was my sole focus, it’s possible I would have gotten more out of it, but it still seems heavily flawed.

It spends very little time making its own points and a huge amount of time trying to refute others. If you’re really into philosophers and psychoanalysts (Kierkegaard, Freud, Rank, and others), maybe you’ll get more out of it. Maybe you’ll already have a good understanding of what is being refuted, but I definitely go into psychology from a mostly layman’s perspective. Way too much went over my head. It reeks of using too many technical terms to hide a weak argument.

It seems to have some valuable information within, but I’d say read the Wikipedia summary, skip the book.

Everything is F*cked is another book by Mark Manson. I’ve exhausted his current book catalog now. I think this book has a tendency to get a little silly even though it tackles some extremely important philosophical issues. It references Kant and Nietzsche a lot along with some other thinkers.

As an example of the silliness, he creates an alternative universe version of Isaac Newton that he calls Emo Newton and basically references his laws of motion, but turns them inward as Emo Newton’s Laws of Emotion. Does it get your attention? A little, but I think the silly roundabout way of making the point detracts from the points more than it helps remember them. The author later mockingly talks about how to create a religion. Again, he has some good points, but it’s a little too long of a journey to get to the point.

There are a lot of good points made in the book. He talks about the paradox of progress not actually making people feel any better. That our actions are all emotions based, not logical. He talks about the failings of Hope itself. And there are plenty more interesting topics that aren’t always intuitive and if you’re not down the philosophical rabbit hole, you probably haven’t heard before.

He honestly identifies a lot of issues that I have in my own life. It was quite impressive to look at some of the things he identified and just say, “Yeah, he nailed it.” As I was reading the book, I was getting pretty excited, waiting for the answers on how to fix it. I mean, I read self-help books to help myself most of all. And that’s the second area where this book misses. It fails to have a real gameplan for resolving the issues brought up in the book.

I think the core thesis of what to do could be summed up as “Do good for the sake of good.” Those are my words, not his, but that’s about it. He also welcomes our robot overlords and doesn’t think we human beings are particularly suited to leading the world. Fair points, but not exactly helpful for us humans.

I’d still recommend the book for people who want to dabble in philosophy or want a relatable entry point, but don’t want to go too far off the deep end. However, I don’t recommend it strongly as a fix to much of anything. It’s much better at identifying problems than identifying solutions.