Marlies

Why did I pick this book?
Recommended as a staple book to read in the category self-development. Was a short read and available in my library.

The book
It's a very short read. Made even shorter by pictures filling entire pages and short chapters.
The book itself is divided into three parts; starting with a story setting the scene; a group of friends meeting at a high school reunion and reflecting on being afraid of changes. Then the actual story of ‘Who moved my cheese' is about; mice and men that need to navigate a maze to find cheese. Each of the four characters has a different approach to address this challenge and the story expertly highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
The last chapter is again from the focus of the high school friends that reflect on how the story's few on change can help them.

My recommendation
A very nicely crafted story. I like how they included especially the last chapter to also reflect on how this story could help people in their day-to-day life. It gives an example of how to interpret the story and an example of how to address someones resistance to change in a positive way.

The story itself is nicely written, easy to digest, and it's neither too dreamy/fuzzy nor too straight-cut as an example story. Due to the translation to mice/cheese and a maze, I think it's easier for a reader to distance themselves from the hard-lessons to learn and easier to jokingly agree that they might resemble one of the characters (as is done in the last chapter).

Definitely recommend for everyone.
Would recommend to follow up with ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People' to give direction to your search for ‘new cheese'.

The experiences Kay talks about feel altogether realistic, strengthened by the lack of sleep from not being able to put the book down.

Hilarious, captivating, realistic

Entertaining.
Finished in one evening though.

why I chose this?
I've saw this book passing by in various recommendations and was intrigued: who isn't interested to learn what the best people have in common?
When I saw it laying around in a yard sale I had to pick it up.

what's it about?
Gladwell analyzes the systems and habits that “great” people have in common. As is probably in mind with a lot of people you hope for ‘easy' habits to pick up and copy. Contrary, Gladwell shows there's bigger mechanisms at play: the luck of when and where you were born, your cultural background, opportunities that have been given.

my opinion
At first I had a bit trouble getting through the book; each chapter generally focuses on a character, and then goes into the details of why that character had the successes it has had in it's life. Some of these backgrounds can be a bit dry.
However, towards the end Gladwell focuses in on cultural background and the difference between cultures which have a foodsystem around grains and cultures revolved around rice (pady's). It's super fascinating!

other recommendations
The last chapters on culture reminded me of the a-ha moments in Yoval Noah Harari's Sapiens and Michael Pollan's Omnivore's dilemma.

Did not finish.

Why did I pick this book
This book was recommended by so many articles/people. Especially in the theme of Mental Models, personal development, etc.
It was a new addition to my local library, so I picked it up when it was available.

The book
The book is by famed investor Ray Dalio. In it he describes in short his personal history and the lessons he learned during his lifetime. Dalio has been very systematic in noting down these lessons and creating a set of principles which he uses to guide his everyday decisions.

It is divided in two sections; life principles and work principles. As the name implies, life lessons focuses on lessons which can be used in life in general, and work principles focuses more on principles you can apply at work.
The text is presented as a long argumentation of how certain principles came to be and what smaller sub-principles are contained within. This is really just a case of different header stylings with short bits of text in between.

What I thought
I was not able to finish this book.
The way the book is formatted it feels like just one long blurb of text and story-telling, with different header styles applied to random sentences throughout. Say you were reading through a long text -say the Bible- and you applied a Header 1 to every 100 sentences, Header 2 to every 80th sentence, etc.
With all these little sub-sub-sub-headers I lost track of the main points and these sub-sub-sub-headers are so general that they did not feel like eye-opening-must-remember-at-all-costs leasons to learn.

I stopped at the Work principles, because they also mostly apply to managers/directors and the higher-ups of a company (the ones making hiring decisions etc).

My recommendations
To get a start at self-development with really actionable steps I would recommend The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
To get a more fun-to-read, actionable, self improvement read my other recommendation would be An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth.