Great guide on fasting by the foremost authority
The book does a good job of breaking down various myths and protocols around fasting as a healthy weight management tool
great for early stage startups looking to implement metrics
OKRs can suck, they are usually overdesigned, and a pain of some wrong. This opinionated take on OKRs is exactly what an early stage startup needs. Should you have 10 OKRs? No, just one OKR set. Should you have individual OKRs? No. Should you cascade OKRs to reams? Maybe. The book is full of practical advice as well as supporting tooling for implementing OKRs such as the four square method, the start and end bookend meetings to drive weekly cadence, building a project pipeline and tools for grading OKRs. I especially love the first third of the book's story approach of a startup going through trouble. I find it much more engaging to learn through stories and relate to them.
Quick easy read. If you have a feeling multitasking doesn't work, this book reinforces it. It gives you tips on how to monotask and how to monotask but most of the advice as you read it is obvious. I felt this could've been a blog post but you may need the additional push, stories and reinforcement considering how big an epidemic is multitasking.
This was a pretty good, well-told story. I started reading this after I watched the TV series. Despite this being a good book, I felt the TV series was better. But I highly recommend both!
I enjoyed this book. It takes a contrarian view to productivity. Think of this book that comes after you've read everything on motivation, productivity and mastery and you're still frustrated by all the things you expect of yourself and fail. Well, this books makes you face your mortality. It addressed the underlying reason for your discomfort: your limited time, your finite-ness. Till you embrace you can't do everything, you'll always feel inadequate. This books helps to reframe the human experience. Once you embrace your limitations... you are set free from angst.
Great book for starting the Witcher
If you've seen Netflix's Witcher series, this book covers the events from season 1. The books are well written, gripping and hard to put down. Highly recommended.
If there's only one book you read for building your startup, this is it. This book is the successor to the Four Steps to the Epiphany and walks you through with painstaking details everything you need to do at each step to be a successful startup. This book is also very complete, its prescriptive and full of great examples, checklists and other items to help you think through where you are. Several years ago, Dr. Blank's book changed my life in how I approach building startups and if you want to get a head start, get this book
Good summary about breath throughout the ages
I had no idea you could do so much with your breath. From increasing body temperature to inducing hallucinations. In this fascinating read, you go through the journey with the author on how we've changed our breathing, and what are some of the breathing techniques you can do. This last part is however poorly written, the appendix has a list of exercises but they don't explain why should you do this particular exercise and what are the benefits. For that, you have to dig back into the text. But this is a great “gateway” book into the subject and to discover some very interesting people like Wim Hoff etc along the way.
This is a good book on how a practitioner should run a product based agile team. Even though it heavily emphasizes their own tools and partly comes off as marketing material for base camp, the lessons here are widely applicable. There are some interesting techniques here which agile teams should think about from running larger 6-week sprint sizes to how scope discovery and task confidence builds during project. The best part is that this is a free book and a fast read.
Malcolm has an uncanny ability to take a lot and summarize it with anecdotes. The Tipping Point is a pretty good book on how ideas spread and essential reading for anyone in marketing.
Paul found out he had stage IV cancer at the same age as me. While his cancer was debilitating, he fought its ups and downs while grappling with the nature of death and treatment. It's well written and Paul had a gift with words. At the end, the book helps you question your morality and what it means to be alive, face death and love.
In a world where network tools like Facebook are designed by the smartest engineers to make you addicted to their services, how do you make sure you get deep meaningful work done? Newport does a great job in summarizing a lot of the problems we face in our new distracted world and what steps to take to win back thoughtful work. Like all things, this requires planning, practice and a conscious effort to do more with our time without expending more of it.
This book is well worth your time if you keep checking your phone, can't do something for 5-10 mins without going to Facebook, Snapchat etc.
Short, valuable read
This book talks about a few practices which you should try in analyzing yourself; how well you follow through, are your expectations out of whack? Etc. It also talks about personality types and the importance of figuring out what you're wired and doing things the way that makes you shine. Another key aspect is figuring out how you learn and digest information in the way you're naturally wired to receive it. There are some dated parts like having a second career at 40 etc (which I didn't agree with) but considering the short read that this is, it's still pretty valuable.
-
This book gives you generally good advice: avoid carbs, eat more fruits and vegetables, reduce caffeine, avoid sugars, sleep on time, sleep 8 hours, meditate, find a spiritual connection, avoid excessive social media and blue screens etc.
The books tends to get preachy at times and feels a little pesudo-sciency at a few points. Some of the recipes start to feel a little extreme and certainly feels like they are made for well-to-do.
Vicktor does the impossible: he walks us through what kept him going at a place where everything was taken away, all purpose stripped, all previous achievements gone. It didn't matter if you were a doctor, everyone was worth nothing. He saw people give up hope, die before their actual death. However; because of his own experience, he studies what made him survive and others like him. Ultimately, for him, it was the thought of seeing his wife again, of completing a scientific paper... things he could live for, beyond his immediate suffering.
If a man can crawl out from such a pit, and push through his challenges, it makes you put in perspective our own challenges and our own limits of what we think is possible and what we are actually capable of doing.
Great sense dense with actionable advice
This books finally combined all my lessons together: from knowing that will power is finite, to the 5-sec rule, to daily habits to finally the definition: a habit doesn't consume will power. This helped me tie everything together and I've been able to form stronger habits.