Books I Just Finished Reading
How We Decide
By Johan Lehrer
The horse and charioteer. The emotional and the rational. Everyday we battle against these portions of our brain to make decisions. Johan Lehrer, journalist and neuroscientist, dives into why we make the types of decisions we do and how challenging conventional methods of decision making can prevent us from making new mistakes. He describes how valuable the emotional side of our brain is in making decisions because after-all, experience is disguised in the subconscious act of emotional thinking. And what is experience exactly? Expectation to it’s outcome. This is just the very surface of richly fascinating book that everyone should go out and get.
Outliers
I just finished this books a few weeks ago. From the title you can already assume the premise of the book: success. But I figured this was largely going to be a “how to” book, but that wasn’t the case. Instead I came to find Malcolm Gladwell’s discussions focused on why people become successful and what surrounding factors contributed to their success or their lack there of. Interesting topics that came up were things like IQ thresholds, the “10,000 hour rule” where true mastery can only be achieved once that amount of practice is performed, and even how much influence dumb blind luck can have on your level of success. By the end of it I felt empowered having some understanding for the rational framework of success. This books has been on the NYT’s best sellers list for forever and a day now so you really don’t have to take my word on it but it’s another book I highly recommend.
The Prophet
BY KAHLIL GIBRAN
With the schedule here in INSEAD I forgot to add this book I finished reading on the flight over to France. My mom gave it to me for Christmas and insisted I read it right away. I have to admit I was a little skeptical to read it, mostly because I presumed it had something to do with religion.
The author Kahlil Gibran was a Lebanese-American artist, philosopher, and writer. Through a fictional story the protagonist The Prophet speaks on the human condition and offers advice on life’s issues in short chapters for each topic. Like I said, even with some biblical over tones I found the teachings relatively unbound from religion and actually extremely insightful. I especially like what was said on relationships and love.
I think a lot of people would enjoy this book. Either way it’s a 90 page book so you’ll only spend a couple of hours on it.
The Universe In a Single Atom
Knowing my fascination for science v. religion, my Buddhist step brother bought me this book. In this book his Holiness essentially explores the common space religion and science share. I highly recommend it.
Obama-nomics
I started reading this book a few weeks ago (before the nuclear bomb went off in our financial markets) and it’s very revealing. It’s a must read for anyone affected by raised energy prices, home foreclosures, the Iraqi war, the corporate ball out of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Bear Sterns and AIG, and the buy outs of Merrill Lynch by B of A and Lehman Brothers by British bank Barclays. That should about cover every American citizen.
