Mitch Olson

About 2-3x longer than it should have been. Great perspective on aging in terms of what gets in the way of “health span” & what we can do to avoid that. But he goes into far too much detail about the underlying biochemistry which gets boring & tedious.

The more I read of Whitehead the more I find our thinking resonates. I especially appreciated the first chapter of this book on the theme of “importance”; what could be more important than importance?!

Writing a book & thinking that the novelty of a “starter villain” or talking animals would be enough to sustain it was naive. Not much here; rather pedestrian really.

The rate of fresh insight that NNT delivers means you can't lose focus for a second lest you lose one. I really loved the first half of this book. It's not meant to educate so much as to be a vehicle for the authors prodigious intellect. He never stops for a second to explain a term which is a little frustrating sometimes as his self-expressor vs other-educator ratio makes him feel somewhat arrogant sometimes. I loved the premise of the book around the significance of “skin in the game” which is such an important concept that is paid much too little attention to in our culture. The later half of the book I found less engaging. I would have liked to see the concept of SITG applied in different domains such as the all-important one of our own lives in which I feel people live as if they don't have skin in the game.

Pop-psychology journalists are the worst of the popular science journalists. You can spot them a mile away because they'll be talking about the how serotonin causes a feeling of serenity or dopamine fuels our curiosity, as if this correlation has anything meaningful to contribute to how we live our life (& which came first, the curiosity or the dopamine. And who cares). You've probably already read a lot of books like this one; there's nothing original here, & most of it is based in the very sketchy domain of neuropsychology. Give this one a miss.

Ross is the thinking man's David Goggins. As mentally tough as they come but with a reflection, intelligence & humility that makes him so much more relatable & likeable. Half of this book is for anyone interested in a great story of man who pushed himself to incredible resillience. The other half is for endurance and adventure athletes, of which I am neither, & shares his research & experience in the physical and mental requirements to master oneself and huge feats. Hats off to Ross.

I first read this book 30 years & loved it. The basic premise of the book is the comparison of the culture & values & practices of modern humankind, which he calls the “takers” (as in the orientation to take things) vs the pre-agrarian hunter-gathers who he calls the “leavers”. Its an interesting comparison of cultures and on modern-day culture which leaves you feeling like we lost something important of our humanity along the way. But this time through I got a bit bored of the preachy tone & slowness & lack of actionable advice. I've still given it 4 stars which is more than it deserves in 2023 I think but congrats to the author on its overall conception & narrative which is good.

Not sure who the audience for this book is. I guess the logotherapists of his day. I was hoping for some more detailed insights on his philosophy and therapeutic approach but beyond the material introduced in Mans search for meaning the rest of this seems targeted at clinical psychologists and psychiatrists working mostly in the domain of treating people with neuroses. Plus, as good as Frankl's early insights on being a human being were, he is still pretty stuck in a medical view of the world. Bit disappointing.

Nothing especially inspiring about this story. He seemed to succeed almost in spite of himself. I don't think I liked him as a person but I admire his tenacity. I don't regret the time I invested in this book but I don't think I would recommend it & 4 stars feels a tiny bit generous.

I didn't learn much from this book. A B2C retail brand might get more from it.

It's not a 8/10 but it's more than a 6/10 so I'm being slightly generous in awarding it 4 stars. For some reason I was expecting a Groundhog Day style book which it wasn't.

I found it really easy to get into and the first half of the book especially was satisfying. Thereafter I found the lack of character development & the teenage psychological development of the 2 main characters to be somewhat Young Adult Fiction-ish. An average rating over 4 reflects a teenage-skewing audience imo.

This isn't a book so much about HOW to change the world as it is as kind of collective autobiography/history book of social entrepreneurs. Misleading title. Didn't learn a single relevant-to-me thing.

I should have read the backcover more clearly. I was looking for something on storytelling at a more abstract level than “just” writing fiction books which I have no personal interest in atm.

There are so many voices in & around the weight loss space, each with a perspective that contradicts at each one of the others. So its hard to know what the fundamental causality around weight loss actually is. The authors insulin thesis is original and seems credible. I think worth looking into. Well written book regardless.

I got bored with this book because their was too much focus on the detail of his pieces of art and not enough on the man himself.

Nothing new here

Fascinating! This book makes you realise that what we take for granted as perception of “reality” is only one version. We're such an arrogant species. We think that our view on the world is the world itself. For instance humans see the world through 3 types of photoreceptor cells. We couldn't even imagine what the world looks like to a Mantis shrimp which has between 12 and 16 types of photoreceptor cells! What I appreciated most about this book is the wakeup reminder that perception is not reality by a long shot, and combined with the insights from people like Donald Hoffman that objective truth is a very naive concept.

He writes well but what he writes about in this book was not interesting enough to keep me engaged.

An American wanker, or I should say a wanker that is American. His point of view seems to be that America is like a MCU super hero that saves the world and we'd all be f**ked if it wasn't for them. Blind drunk on the koolaid of American patriotism which discounts the credibility of his analysis. Predict he ends up as a pundit on Fox News or highly paid advisor to a Republican president.

I picked this book up because I was hoping to understand more about semiotics and cognition from the perspective of an anthropologist and from a perspective that transcended the human. Instead my experience of this book is mostly stories about the Amazonians & how they relate to their world. Definitely doesn't live up to the claim of its title.

Some great & practical info in here on how to extend your life expectancy.

Book only marred by the author's pitiful attempts to respond to arguments that longevity will place inevitably greater pressure on the planet. I think he would have been better of quietly ignoring this problem rather than making such an embarrassing hash of a response.

I didn't really get much out of this book. Assumes a knowledge beyond general cybernetics to a prior familiarity with von Forester's work which I didn't have. And beyond that a relatively low signal to noise ratio.

I found this book a little slow going but ultimately was redeemed for me in the depth of research & thinking that the author put into understanding the foundations of language, intelligence & what it might be like to learn how to communicate with a wholly different type of intelligence than our own.

A couple of my favourites quotes (from fictitious authors) in the book;

> It is not just the symbols we use in our language that are arbitrary—it is what we choose to signify with them. We give words only to the things that matter to us as a society. The things that make no difference to us are erased from our world by never becoming a part of language in the first place.
In this way, each language organizes the world into a pattern. Each language decides what has meaning—and what does not. As native speakers, we are born inside this pattern, this semiotic cosmos.

> What does it mean to be a self? I think, more than anything else, it means the ability to select between different possible outcomes in order to direct oneself toward a desired outcome: to be future-oriented. When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity to choose between different possibilities, we say we don't “feel alive”—and here I think we guess at what being alive actually is. It is the ability to choose. We live in choices

I was hoping for a more fundamental understanding of how information operates in physical, chemical and biological realms but somehow this book manages to miss providing a solid grounding in the title of the book or even a understandable explanation of what a hologram is.

A somewhat autobiographical account on the reflections of the dying from the perspective of a Palliative carer. Well told & quite touching at times.