Bazerashvili

Mark is one of the biggest advocates of primal style of living, and this book is dedicated to telling us how and why we should also be interested in that.

With his extensive explanations he covers all the domains of life which you can immensely improve with primal approaches. Most of this book is dedicated to explaining how we can eat like our primal ancestors ate, and why is it important to eat that way.

You will understand and foresee the possible scenarios of your health and your life in general, if you continue down the path that conventional wisdom tells you is the right one.

Author talks about the importance of a hormone called insulin, and how it correlates to everything else, including your whole diet and exercise attempts.

And much more...

In short, Mark's work more or less solved one of the biggest puzzles of mine, what can I do to live a healthy life, but there's still lots to find out and experiment with.

My intuition tells me that this book can change your life, if you really consider Mark's advice and implement everything (even part of) what he talks about in your everyday life.

A very inspiring and insightful story of a young man, who wanted to know the Truth of existence.

Siddhartha was a son of Brahman, but haven't found the Truth in following his father's teachings and doing rituals.

Then he became a Samana but discovered that living as an ascetic doesn't mean much. The Truth was not found in asceticism.

After that, he became a merchant, a gambler, a lover, a father and played many other roles, that he thought was necessary to go through after talking with Gautama the Buddha when he was still a Samana wandering through the world with his friend Govinda. He got lost in the content of his materialistic life and lost the connection with Being, that he developed in his early years of living.

He was desperate until he started living with the ferryman Vasudeva, which symbolizes a possibility of finding out the Absolute Truth without teachings, rituals, gurus, etc.

Finally, with the help of the old ferryman, Siddharta realized what he was searching his entire life. It was the Truth of Om. Om was the sound of the river. It was the only thing that there was. The river taught him that everything was perfect as it was. The stone was worth loving not because it had a potential of becoming an animal, a person, or the Buddha, but because it already was everything. It already contained every possible thing in it.

Love, according to Siddharta, was above all the words, thoughts and teachings. It was the foundation of all the things. The ability to love everything equally was the ability that was gained after his Enlightenment.

I think that with the story of Siddharta, the author wanted to tell us that searching for the Truth can't be done with books, teachings, or even communicating with the realized beings. The path can be long and full of traps and obstacles, but from the absolute perspective, as Siddharta told to Govinda in the end, there really is no path, there isn't even a Nirvana because passing the gateless gate, as Zen people like to say, reveals the Oneness of all the dualities...

This is one of the most important books that I've ever read...

I've been experimenting with Digital Minimalism for the last couple of years, especially for the last year, when I significantly reduced the usage of social media, seeing them as platforms designed to hook our attention as best as they can. Cal's book helped me to solidify the ideas that were motivating me to restrict the usage of some of the services, and it was a very interesting read since I've already had many references to all the negative aspects of unrestricted social media usage that he talks about.

With all the books he's written so far, Cal advocates living a deep life without distractions and full of meaning. That is impossible if you spend multiple hours a day scrolling social media feeds and justifying to yourself that this is your choice. No, it's the attention economy, the roots of which can be found in the 1830s. It's the idea that when you don't pay for the product, you are the product. That's especially clear when you start observing just how all the social media applications try to lure you in with their slot-machine-like mechanisms that hook you and make it impossible to spend your time in much more meaningful ways.

If you think that you don't have time for your hobbies, for reading books, meditation, or exercise, and meanwhile you spend multiple hours a day scrolling Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok like a zombie, read this book as soon as possible.

A very fun book to read. I didn't know much about Steve or his life but as it turns out he lived his life with a mindset that I try to embody myself, and that is the mindset of a master.

When he was a kid, he was interested in magic and while working in a magic shop in Disneyland, he learned tricks that he would perform in front of customers. That was where his fascination with performing had begun, which continued and eventually bloomed into something much greater.

The most important insight that I've got from Steve's autobiography is the importance of attitude towards one's work. His relationship with comedy and being a comic made him a star. He deliberately practiced to make his performance as best as he could, and after thousands of hours on stage and lots of trial and error, he became one of the best.

I'll always remember the phrase that he said in one of his interviews: “Be so good that they can't ignore you”.

That's the recipe to succeed basically in everything in life, and this book perfectly illustrates how to live a life to become so good that people can't ignore you anymore.