Booknotes

12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson is a book about how to live a good life. The most memorable thing about it is that you should have a resemblance of order within your life. Because without order, everything else quickly falls to pieces and problems arise. And problems hurt.

Seven Habits is one of the most influential books I have read in my whole life. I think it's the best self-help book out there and if internalized and incorporated into your life, the principles from this book have the potential to change your life drastically.

Stoicism is a philosophy that is concerned with one question: How to live a good life? It's about being resilient against outside influences, mentally and physically. And about preparing for the worst, keeping death in mind, but being content with whatever happens.

Algorithms from computer science are a source of knowledge that can be used to improve our lives. Problems like optimal stopping, exploration vs. exploitation tradeoffs, or how to sort things, are ubiquitous not just in computer science but also in real life. To me, the most memorable part is the 37% rule, which states that after having explored 37% of the time, I should leap into the best of the things found so far, and pursue only that.

A rather short book about a dystopian world. The people in this world live miserable lives in small rural communities. Every little bit of individuality is artificially repressed and held down. They have forgotten words such as "I", "my" and "yours" everything is "us" and "ours"...

Nicholas Nassim Taleb writes a lot of good books. This is one of them. In Antifragile, Taleb tries to push one central idea: The difference between Fragile and Antifragile Systems. Antifragile systems learn and improve over time. They use small errors to get better and disarm the harmful effects of black swans.

The main idea of this book is that Rational Egoism is virtuous and necessary. We need to take accountability of our own future. When doing so, we improve the future for everybody. Out of egoism flows altruism. But the book packages and weaves this idea into a gripping story, where good and bad fight it out, and the egoistic people simply leave, letting society collapse and die. Hence the name of the book, Atlas Shrugged.

Habits are a powerful way to shape behavior towards living a better life. Atomic Habits are about preparing yourself and the environment for a better life. The goal is to make good habits easy and bad habits hard. Good habits should be obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. Habits are processes, but they flow from and also build identities. "I am a writer" results from "I write every day". But "I write every day" also follows from "I am a writer".

Awareness is a book about waking up and realizing what we truly are. About stopping to identify ourselves with our desires and becoming free of the restrictions that our minds place upon ourselves.

Hands down one of the best books I have ever read. I very very strongly recommend picking up a copy. Robert Sapolsky is one of the most knowledgeable people on the topic of human behavior and this book is a tour de force display of that knowledge. I feel this book should be read in full and I don't do it justice when summarizing...

Consciousness is something measurable and we are beginning to understand what it is. But there is still a lot left to learn and uncover. Theories like Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and the Free Energy Principle are promising starts, but still fall short of a complete picture.

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the most influential books in history I would argue. And for that reason alone it's worth reading, to get a broader idea of different cultures and see where ideas come from and how old some of them are. It is connected in thought with lots of other philosophical directions, like Taoism or Stoicism.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb at his best. A little angry on the state of the world, and knowing that he often knows better. To me the most memorable idea from this book is the allegory of the Turkey. It's a story about how a turkey tries to predict the future based on past data and fails. We are the turkeys.

The main idea of the book is simple yet profound. You have a part of your "brain", that "thinks" fast – subconsciously – and makes decisions in an instant. You could call it instinct or reflex or muscle memory. But the point is that it's snappy. It happens in the blink of an eye, doing complex tasks and problems effortlessly.

Blood Music, without spoiling anything, is about different forms of intelligence, about something alien to us, about biotechnology and experiment, about humans and how we cling to our notions of normal and the "self". It deals with all of these questions, and weaves them into a beautiful story.

Companies that are built to last have things in common. And this book looked at a lot of companies successful over longer time frames to find out what. One idea is that business ideas don't matter. Assembling the right team and the right work environment and culture are more important for a company to thrive. Get the right people on the bus, then decide where it is going and steer if necessary.

This is a wonderful introduction to all the people that contributed to the field, and amounts to a vibrant list of books, and articles and papers that I now want to read as well. This books, just opens the door, to go out and search for much much more, inviting the reader down into a wonderful rabbit hole.

This book moved me. Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar shares the wisdom he gained while running this groundbreaking company, trying to innovate and make beautiful movies. It goes against the spirit of this book to summarize it, because the insights from the book, need careful thinking and consideration.

Deep Work is the most important work you want to do, but it is also the hardest work to do and make time for. It's easy to seem busy and be always working and stressed out, without making any progress. That's because one is not doing enough deep work. Deep work is enabled by scheduling time, good habits and controlled focus and attention. This book shows "how" to do more of that.

I read this book in German, so the detailed notes contain a bunch of quotes in German, but the book itself was amazing. The idea of the Magical Theater that shows you different alternate versions of how your life could have gone is powerful.

This book is a collection of quotes and teachings from the Dalai Lama. It covers a wide range of topics, from the nature of desire to the importance of being content with what you have. The Dalai Lamas teachings are simple and profound, and they offer a powerful message of hope and compassion in a world that is often filled with suffering and strife. The main notes around it are in German, as I read it in German.

In this book, Robert Sapolsky is attacking the notion that free will exists. He does so by looking at the brain, the environment, and the interactions between the two. He also looks at the implications of this for society and the individual and how we should change our legal system and how we assign blame as a result of this new understanding of how our brains work.

This book is truly wonderful. A quick read, filled with extremely beautiful, almost poetry-like prose, and small short stories, about deeply human desires, fears and ideas, woven into small short stories about different universes, where time works completely different from how it does in ours.

An incredible biography of the life of "the raddest man alive" - Elon Musk. To me the most important takeaway from this book is this: If you want to have an amazing future, you have to go out and build it yourself. No matter what it takes.

This book heralds the arriving of nanotechnology in the future and tries to show the endless possibilities that could exist, once we have mastered atomic manufacturing. It proposes to build structures out of carbon, so that they have extremely strong bonds, like diamond or graphene, yet are electrically conductive and useful. The idea of being able to control materials at an atomic level, and at scale, gives rise to things that seem like magic to us now, yet aren't as far away as we think they are.

This book is a fun little read. It's about how we have lost the character values of the enlightened era and how that leads to slow corrosion of best practices in the market as well. It's about how all of this can be transformed back to resemble more how things have been, while also making sure that we keep the good new things.

Focus on what is important and declutter your life. The title summarizes this book almost perfectly. Basically declutter your life from things you don't need, focusing on what you want to have in your life. And try to reduce the amount of things that you want to a minimum, because it will make you overall happier. Decluttering is good.

Humans play all kinds of games with each other and with themselves. Most of human activity can be looked at through this lens of "games that we play". There are status games, money games, games of friendship and family.

Chess, learning, climbing, swimming, playing music, coding, parkour, conversations, skiing, philosophizing, proving mathematical theorems, painting and a host of other activities can lead to the same cognitive and mental state => Flow.

This is Part 1 in the series. The Foundation is about a galactic empire that's about to end, and a mathematician that calculates that this is going to happen, who then goes on to devise a plan of creating a "Foundation" that keeps science and knowledge alive, to help the Galactic Empire and prosperity recover. This plan is known as the Hari Seldon plan, and the books play out the adventures of the people living in the Foundation he created.

As the Empire is dying and the Foundation is gaining more power, due to their advancement of understanding in science and Engineering, the two factions struggle over power and fight against each other. A new ruler in the Empire, seems to win that struggle in his favor, pushing the Foundation to the brink of extinction.

Hari Seldon's plan is rumored to have secretly involved not only the scientificly minded foundation to preserve knowledge and steer humanity into a better and brighter future, but also a Second Foundation, one where the people are rumored to have magic powers. The people from the first foundation want to find the Second Foundation, because they think their own plans are endangered by their existence.

The leaders of the Second Fondation are worried that another "power" is trying to push along the Hari Seldon plan, benefiting instead of destroying it. Yet, they are worried and want to know who and why they are doing it, and send out a mission to the closest lead, a planet named Gaia, to find out.

This is a Sequel to the Foundation Series. Some people from the Foundation find out that, according to their knowledge, there has to be a point of origin for humanity. A planet, somewhere in the galaxy, from where all humans came from, before they spread throughout the whole galaxy. And so they embark on an adventure to find that place, our Earth.

Hari Seldon first develops his mathematical idea of psychohistory and becomes the target of the Galactic Emperor because of it. The emperor thinks he could use this as a tool to gain better political control over his empire. In a process of intrigue Hari Seldon eventually flees to a remote sector of the Galaxy, trying to find out more about where civilization originated, in an attempt to develop psychohistory.

The last book of the 7 foundation novels. It's about how Hari Seldon develops his plan and psychohistory. And how he has to deal with the power struggles of Galactic Politics and the Empire. In the process he loses everybody close to him, finally continuing almost alone, pushing the Seldon plan into action, to ease the suffering of humanity during the dark ages between the two Galactic Empires. The only person still helping him, is his adopted and gifted granddaughter.

This is a book about a few very deep and important questions - how can physics give rise to life? And how can life give rise to intelligent, comprehending minds? The short answer to all of these questions is ... evolution. The longer answer, to how that process actually works these "miracles" is found in this book.

This is one of my most favorite books of all time. Tough to read, even harder to summarize. But worth to read, and then re-read. And re-read. The dialogues where the turtoise discusses important riddles and philosophical questions alone, make this book worthwhile. How they are self referentially tied into the whole picture, makes it even better.

The main takeaway is that the character quality of grit - others might call it persistence, perseverance or resilience - in Finland they call it Sisu, is the main predictor of success. If you can face problems and bad times with equanimity and push through the pain, that's the one important ingredient necessary to set up for success in life.

A good book on effective management. For me it is not too applicable right now, since I am not managing people, otherwise, this might have deserved a better rating even. Very likely something that I am going to revisit a few years down the road.

In this book Derek Sivers tries to answer the question of how to best live life. The funny thing is that each answer is contradictory to the previous ones, highlighting the absurdity of the question and also giving a glimpse into all the different approaches one could take to life in the first place.

How to Read a Book is a Book about how to retain more from reading texts - it is about reading a book, not for the sake of passing time but for the sake of gaining insights from it. To do that it details 4 different levels of reading.

This book is worth it if you don't yet know how to travel on a budget and still need that paradigm shift of: "Oh wait, you can travel the world while spending less money than what you would have spent when you stayed at home in Europe or the US"

This is one of the best self-help books in existence. The insights are incredibly powerful ideas about how humans interact with one another. The title puts a bad wrap on the whole book because it makes it seem to be about manipulation. But in reality, the book teaches how to build long-lasting, genuine relationships. And how to care for other people.

A book about how the human immune system works. It goes over the different cell types and how they work together to fight off diseases of all kinds. The body is an incredibly machine, and even though the immune system is just a part of it, it's mindbogglingly complex.

A book about attention and techniques that help focusing our attention, when faced with the diversions of a modern life. It's explaining many basic ideas about how to live a more productive life, by restricting time spend mindlessly engaged with media in various ways.

Complaining against fate and what the future holds, is not valuable. You should instead take everything the world throws at you with grace and humility. Staying in one place, reading the same books, not jumping around, is a source of strength and personal growth. Being content with what you have, is the skill necessary to be happy. If you can't be happy with what you have, you'll never be.

Max Tegmark wants the reader to think about the problems of AI safety and the thorny questions related to creating machines that surpass us in intelligence someday. He reasons that this is possible and maybe even possible sooner than we think and therefore we should start working on solving these problems as soon as possible.

Lying (intentional deception) erodes trust on both sides. It damages relationships in unforeseen ways, needs maintenance and leads to psychological stress. It doesn't help other people live a better life and often leads to slow but sure decline of beautiful relationships. And the benefits are not nearly enough, especially in the long run, to justify all of that.

The contents of the mind are within our control, whereas the outside environment is not. Stoics become happy by focusing on and learning how to control their internal state, no matter the external state. Once this control exists, the outside does not matter anymore. Happiness – or a stoic calm and peace – can be achieved anywhere, at any time. This is the ideal to strive for. The ideal of the Stoic Sage.

There are two mindsets – growth and fixed mindset. Growth Mindset is the one you want to have. It's enabling you to learn, and to achieve mastery over time. The fixed mindset on the other hand, prevents you from challenging yourself. It means you are accepting things and your current state as it is, instead of pushing and risking failure.

One of my favorite books of all time. I grew up reading Michael Ende, but this is one of the books, which changes it's meaning as you grow up. It's about appreciating the small, but important things in life. Savouring the moments, and not forgetting, for the sake of time and efficiency, what it means to be alive.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is one of the best books I have ever read and one I am going to re-read over and over and over again, simply because it is packed so full of wisdom that it's unbelievable. A collection of quotes, tweets and interviews and writings from AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, collected by Eric Jorgenson.

This is the book that popularized the 10.000 hours idea. The main idea behind the rule is this: There exists a level of mastery that can be achieved for any kind of subject, after having deliberately practiced and studied it for at least 10.000 hours.

The story is about how computation is supreme, and how reality might be a construct that is very different from what we think it is. The crazy idea in this book is that a simulation might continue running, if it is sufficiently complex enough, even if the hardware that it is running on is shut off. Around this idea this book weaves a beautiful story, of how people design worlds to escacpe into and out of them.

The book is split into 3 parts - the personal history of Ray Dalio, his work principles and his life principles. To me, the most interesting part of the book is, where he details his life principles. Beautiful ideas and mental models of how to live a good life fill the pages.

A rehash of learnings from the inner workings at 37signals. Basically, remote work is good for everyone involved and therefore it is what people should be doing. It's a win for the employee because they have more freedom and it's a win for the employer because their employees are more productive. So every company who can, should embrace a remote work culture.

In this science fiction novel humans explore a neutron star and find life on it. The catch is, the life on the neutron star experiences time a lot differently. They live extremely fast, undergoing millenia of their history, in mere seconds of human time. In this second book, the neutron star, collapses a little, causing a huge catastrophe.

In this book Alan Watts, in essence, argues that by ceasing the relentless striving for control and allowing ourselves to simply be, we can rediscover the wonder of our existence and our unity with the world around us.

When AI takes off and becomes more intelligent than Humans, there are a lot of scenarios that are potentially wiping out humans. This is a detailled analysis of how these scenarios might unfold, discussing strategies and ways to potentially avoid them. The main takeaway, superintelligent machines can be extremely bad, in many different, and surprising ways. And most of them are as obvious and hostile as SkyNet.

There is a universal "substance", the Tao, that permeates all and is all. But yet isn't. There is nothing, yet something, and the Tao is undefinable by mere words and defies understanding and logic, yet it underlies all there is.

Mastery is something everybody can achieve if working hard towards it. And the way towards mastery is rewarding and beautiful. A life of striving, is a life well lived and worth living. What we strive towards is not important, the striving itself, the pushing of our boundaries and learning who we are is. This book is about how to do that.

The book introduces a single concept - The Beginning of Infinity - from many different angles. What the book means by Infinity is the open-ended journey of cosmic exploration. Other people might call this the "Cosmic Endowment" of humanity. And we are at the beginning of it.

The Diamond Age is as crazy as Neal Stephensons other books. It is set in a slightly dystopian world, where everybody has access to nanotechnology and people can print anything they want from "the feed". The world is divided into classes. Each has it's own zone of influence, with nanotechnoloy protecting the barriers, like an ever present immune system. But a struggle emerges over a new piece of nanotech.

In this book, humans plan and execute a scientific mission to a neutron star, where they discover, that on the planet of the neutron star exists a species of life. This species however, lives orders of magnitude faster than humans, and undergoes scientific progress at tremendous rates, within mere days they have discovered agriculture and soon they leap to the stars. A beautiful story of the contact between the two civilizations unfolds.

In this book Carlo Rovelli takes us on a journey through the nature of time, from the perspective of physics, philosophy, and human experience and shows how the three differ wildly. What we think time is like, is nothing like what it actually is. Time in a way does not exist, at least not in the way that we think it does. And Rovelli does a beautiful job of explaining what time really is, tying it back into a notion of beauty and humanness, somehow.

We are on a route of exponential growth in technology. At some point this growth will be so quick, that there will be extreme advances each and every day and eventually every hour. This point coincides with the invention of general AI. Essentially once computers can do inventive work as well as humans can, it's just about scaling up the computers, which can be done extremely fast.

The Unicorn Project is a book about organizational change and the improvement of working conditions within tech organizations. It's about strategies and ideas that engineers can employ to maximize their and their teams' contributions to the company.

This book by Alan Watts is trying to present Zen Buddhism in a way that it makes sense for the Western Mind. It is a great introduction to the topic and a good starting point for further exploration because Alan Watts has a way of breaking down spiritual topics into understandable pieces, cutting through the mysticism, without losing it.

A classic that has shaped a lot of thinking in economics over the last centuries. Adam Smith describes how markets interact with one another and how countries should be governed so that the market can flourish. A central idea is tying these thoughts together - the invisible hand. Free trade leads to the emergence of efficiency. And the pie get's bigger almost "magically".

One of the best books in existence. Highly creative, highly unique, and extremely thought-provoking. How startups work, and how they don't. Why good ideas are important, and how to find them, and why we have to build the future ourselves, or else it won't happen.