Actually "Pragmatic Thinking & Learning" is excellent and I totally forgot about it. I'd probably swap that into my list.

Link to a cool TED-talk (20 hours): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY

:)

Great read, I reread it frequently. Even if you aren't applying it to tennis it's incredible useful information to be aware of.

The Inner Game of Tennis

A Guide to Better Movement: The Science and Practice of Moving with More Skill and Less Pain

Punished by Rewards

Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution by Bowles

http://theinnergame.com/products/books/the-inner-game-of-ten...

Can you elaborate on this please? I've read The Inner Game of Tennis and I'm familiar with the (samatha) jhanas (and somewhat experienced as well). Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana, etc?

If you connect with this idea, you may want to check out the book The Inner Game of Tennis:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Inner-Game-Tennis-Performance/dp/0...

Marie Kondo's book on tidying up is also of delightfully broader utility than the title implies. I just recently finished it - it is a surprisingly insightful book and a real pleasure to read. Highly recommended!

Audiobooks (Audible):

Food: A Cultural Culinary History - The Great Courses (if you've ever searched for 'authentic' food, I strongly, strongly recommend this book. It was one of my favorite listening experiences of the year)

City of Thieves - David Benioff (Wonderful storytelling, I recommend the audio version just for the performance)

The Elephant Whisperer - Lawrence Anthony (Another example of great storytelling, highly recommended)

Little Princes - Conor Grennan (Conor does a good job of teleporting you to another world and capturing the inner spirit of being a child anywhere in the world)

The Inner Game of Tennis - Timothy Gallwey (A great paradigm for practice and improvement)

Books:

Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl (For some, this will be life changing. ~3 hour read is all)

Tools of Titans - Tim Ferriss (I've only read through one time, but I plan to use this as a sort of reference book. I agree true that you'll enjoy 50%, love 20% and never forget 10%, but what falls under each category is different for everyone)

The Three Body Problem - Liu Cixin (I haven't read any sci-fi in a few years, this was a great reentry to the genre for me)

The Food Lab - J Kenji Lopez-Alt (If you want to know the why as well as the how when you cook, this book is for you)

There's a reason everyone recommends "The Inner Game of Tennis" in this context.

Also if you want to level up your skills, and learn about learning in general, these are some books you should check:

- Practice perfect

- Peak

- A mind for numbers

- The inner game of tennis

- Guitar zero

- The art of learning

Recommended reading - "The Inner Game of Tennis" and "Impro" by Keith Johnstone. These are pretty easy reads and have helped me out tremendously in unexpected ways.

I also recommend it.

I've been trying to find solutions myself - I'm trying to use some strategies listed in this book: The inner game of tennis, by Timothy Galloway, and I'm seeing positive results so far. He talks about 2 versions of self: self1 - the doer and self2 - the judgemental self, which is constantly evaluating self1, and adversely affect self1's potential. He has some useful suggestions on how to limit the impact of self2, and I found those pretty helpful so far.

I am glad to see Csikszenmihalyi on the list as well. Flow is a very powerful concept; we all know it, but understanding it and using it effectively is a different matter entirely.

After reading The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, I realized that all three books are actually talking about the same subject from different perspectives.

To this list, I would add:

anything by Robert Grudin, but especially:

Time and the Art of Living and The Grace of Great Things

How to solve it by G. Polya

Conceptual Blockbusting by James Adams

Nice to see the Mortimer Adler recommendation as well, but I think his How to Read a Book should be a prerequisite for serious reading.

As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion that true understanding requires the kind of depth that comes from knowing one's self intimately. It's a lot harder than it sounds, especially for a technologist.

Generally the reason people like these books is because openly advertising you like them makes you sound enlightened.

* How To Develop Your Thinking Ability by Ken Keyes Jr. It's out of print now, but easy to find a copy. It condenses down a lot of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics into an easy to digest format.

* The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. Also quite an old book, mentions a lot of similar ideas to Psychocybernetics (essentially the queen or king of all self-help books: most other ones just re-iterate the ideas in this one). It discusses how the thinking mind gets in the way of true excellence. I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from entering into meditative jhana.

* Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. While certainly filled with some questionable ideas, this absolutely broke my neat model of objective reality into tiny little pieces in high school. It set off a journey of self-exploration.

While some of the books in this list are good, everyone in silicon valley talks about a lot of those books nonstop. You'll understand the language SV folks use to talk about ideas, but you won't offer much else in the way of a unique perspective. A journey of reading needs to be self-lead.

I read the book primarily to help with meditation skills, and it gave me a lot of new perspective during my sits.

The Inner Game of Tennis

Impro by Keith Johnstone

Seeing Like a State

The Timeless Way of Building

Linear and Geometric Algebra by Alan Macdonald

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (read this one thrice)

The Tao of Pooh

Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd

The Drama of the Gifted Child

Interaction Ritual

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

Of niche use:

Mathematics: its Content, Methods and Meaning - mostly useful for figuring out what math you don't know. I recommend reading it at a fairly decent pace, and noting what subjects don't sound like an overview of something you've already learned.

It's essentially taking a coaching mentality towards your writing, letting the reader take the steps themselves to feel confident in it, and then only afterwards telling them what they are actually doing (e.g. in that context, properly serving).

It's a fantastic process and the book, of course, explains how it works in the context of teaching tennis.

"Exaggerating Courage" usually works much better than faking it, at least for me, because it's based on a kernel of truth instead of a lie. For example I've never had a tennis lesson but I used to be good at basketball and other sports. So when I'm on the tennis court, even though my technique is poor, I remind myself that I have good hand-eye coordination and agility. So I focus on the fact that "I'm quick!" instead of "My backhand is lame!"

Focus on your strengths, not your perceived weaknesses. Of course when I'm really "in the zone" I'm in a state of Relaxed Confidence where I'm not talking to myself, either positive or negative, and I'm merely reacting to what's required at the moment. It's the ideal mind-body-state to be in when you're trying to return a serve, sink a free throw, hit a fast ball, or in many other non-sports situations. For more on this, check out...

The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance by Timothy Gallwey.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Inner-Game-Tennis-Performance/dp/0...

- Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

- Tools of Titan by Tim Ferriss

- Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen

- Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction by Chris Sims

- Build Better Products by Laura Klein

- Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Picketty

- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

- Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez

- Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin

- Grit by Angela Duckworth

- Love Sense by Sue Johnson

- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

- Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

- Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg

- Sprint by Jake Knapp

- Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb

- Becoming a Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett

- Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock

- The Inner Game Of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

- Design Sprint by Richard Banfield

- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

- Advanced Swift by Chris Eidoff

- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Some of these books are older and had been on my list for awhile. Some were released this year. Most of these books are very good. I usually stop reading bad books by the end of the first chapter.

The book is only tangentially related to tennis - the real meat of the book is about how to adopt useful mentalities which will help you succeed at a variety of things. It's an extremely easy read and can be finished casually in a few days.

A great book which made me question some of my most deeply held beliefs about learning.

He was a badass, grew up in South Central, would ride his bike to nicer areas of LA where there were tennis courts, and just hit against the wall until someone else would show up & he’d ask to play with them.

Ended up playing in High School, and getting a full ride to a DI college.

He told me that reading this book when he was trying to get scholarships to college was one of the turning points in his life and then said, “How I’m teaching you to respond to adversity on the court is preparation for the more important challenges you’ll face in your life off the court.”

To this day, I often suggest this book to anyone as it played a similar role in my life as well.

There is a fantastic book called, "The Inner Game of Tennis" that helps describe that the ability to reach your max potential is to silence the self-criticizing ego and essentially just do it by seeing and feeling.

Anecdotal? Sure Interesting? Absolutely.

A quick trip over to reddit will reveal dozens, perhaps hundreds, of posts from people who have followed Bob Ross' methods and create a piece of art that brings them joy and satisfaction despite possibly a lifetime of doubting that they had the ability. In that sense I rank him up there amongst other great teachers who have been able to find methods that allow people to get past the initial stages of self-doubt and embarassment and begin participating in a fulfilling activity. Think "The Inner Game of Tennis" or "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". Anyone who can let the everyman participate in the satisfaction that comes with creating something is pretty darned ok in my books.

I am not sure if Notch quite lives up to that legacy, but it is a comparison that I think anyone should be flattered to receive.

- Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain - Helped me better understand myself and others, highly recommend

- The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey - Advice on mastering the mental part of doing anything, not just tennis

- The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo - actually maybe the most important book I've read in a while, helped me throw away a lot of stuff I didn't need

- Models by Mark Manson - very helpful and ethical advice on attracting women for people like me who never really quite figured it out

- A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine- discussion of a philosophy of life that seems like it would work well for modern living

Words can be a tiny part of it, but usually gut feelings are about all those things you can't process as easily with rational thinking and so rely on a different, less precise and more general, method of analyzing. This does not play well with language, which is very accurate and precise, very intellectual.

It's why we can easily walk, but have a hard time describing how we walk.

A commenter on HN talked about the book "The inner game of tennis" not so long ago. I highly recommend it to get a gentle introduction to this part of us. Especially on this site, where a lot of us are geeks who are more used to leverage their rational thinking than their feelings.

Last year, many commenters talked about meditation. While I do recommend the practice, starting from the sport point of view is way easier to swallow and make a better starting point for people with strong affinity with precision and step by step logic.

My tennis coach gave me his copy, from the mid 80s, which was tattered and had clearly been read many, many times.

It taught me so much about life, and how to be successful.

My tennis coach was also my life coach when I reflect back on those days. He grew up in south central LA, rode his bike to the closest tennis courts and sometimes as far as Beverly Hills. He'd wait outside the courts until someone came along and ask if he could play.

He turned that into a full ride scholarship for tennis, became a senior level member of a huge telecom and then left to coach tennis to give back to the sport that gave him so much. He credited this book for teaching him how to focus on the important elements in life and most of all, the grit required to succeed.

Anyways, it's a great read. I haven't read the revised edition but I'm sure it's just as compelling.

Think of learning as an interactive loop: you try something and see the outcome. Like, if you're learning to throw a baseball, you try a million of small adjustments until your body-mind gets a feel of the movement and the associated outcome (read The Inner Game Of Tennis).

Similarly, when programming, your mind starts thinking and imagining in the constructs it experienced and internalized. Getting a feel of these constructs and patterns is the result of using them enough times to build things or solve puzzles.

If you want to get a feel of ruby, I recommend going through the exercises here:

https://github.com/JoshCheek/ruby-kickstart

The videos are optional, just download the repo, set up ruby and rspec, open your favorite text editor and you're set.

You might find the book The Inner Game of Tennis useful.

It's generally better to run the feedback through the same unconscious mental pathways you use to do the activity, rather than the verbal storytelling loop that can think thoughts like "I don't like how I did this". Use the parts of the brain that are good at painting, not the parts that are good about telling stories about your painting.

I highly recommend reading "The Inner Game of Tennis" to get a much better sense of this distinction. It's broadly applicable to all sorts of skill acquisition and improvement. The best way to learn how to do something is to quietly and non-judgmentally watch yourself doing it. Your brain is really good at figuring that all out once you've started.

You should read The Inner Game of Tennis. Actually I think there's a version about golf as well. That book has been a life changer for many people and it is exactly about what it seems you have been experiencing.

Anybody interested should just read Part I of the book. Parts II and III are where he starts to run off the rails a bit.

Although not a neuroscientist, my understanding is that a quite a few of his observations in Part I have been reproduced, along with a few of his speculative hypotheses.

In my experience, the main benefit of reading the book was in gaining a more precise definition of consciousness. We tend to have many different things in mind when we talk about consciousness. :-) Jaynes gets very precise about what he means by "consciousness" before he introduces his theory. Within the scope of his narrow definition, I find compelling his argument that consciousness developed after and as a result of language.

Also, for those who are also familiar with and fans of Tim Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis you should note that Gallwey first published a few years before Jaynes.

Also, I have never played tennis but I read the book 'The inner game of Tennis' (W. Timothy Gallwey) and it was a very enlightening experience for me.
It seems some of these books somehow use the subject matter purely as a parable or metaphor that is so powerful, and they shine a light on a very core aspect of being.
I recommend the 'inner game of tennis' to anyone , even if you never hit a single ball in your life ...

Thinking, Fast and Slow: Really should have been subtitled The Ludic Fallacy Run Amok. Filled with grand generalisations based on dubious conclusions from small under-powered behavioural experiments. Read if you want further evidence that Behavioural Economics, that bastard child of psychology is an edifice built on bullshit.

Masters of DOOM: A homage from a fanboy meant for other fanboys. It definitely has its bits of brilliance but it is still a chore to finish.

The Inner Game of Tennis: At 161 pages it might seem short but is in fact 160 pages too long. I bought it after someone on HN said its advice wasn't really about tennis but about life. I wonder what that person was smoking at the time.

The run run run is from an example in the book. I noticed when the Detroit Red Wings were on a losing skid this year players had "skate skate skate" written on the tape of their stick. Also, Roberta Vinci quoted Mindset after taking down Serena Williams at the US Open. And Roger Federer has talked about using a lot of tactics in Mindset.

[1].http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Mental-Guide-Jackie-Reardon/dp...

[2]http://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/...

To your point, some of the books were hugely successful when released, but don't receive much attention today due to the newer books in the spotlight. We all live in different worlds so some books will be wildly popular to some groups and foreign to others.

Whilst it's technically a tennis coaching book, the tennis is really just an example to explain bigger things.

Anyway, there's a great story in that book where he says something like "if you want to put someone off their game, compliment them on how strong their backhand [or whatever] is today. From then on they'll think about it before every stroke and destroy their own performance."

In the book "The Inner Game of Tennis" (fantastic read, more about the brain than tennis), the author explains how, during service, the other player has to respond before the first player has hit the ball, because of simple physics -- if the 2nd player waits for the ball to be hit then he absolutely doesn't have the time to do anything before the ball is on him. (That's probably also true of baseball, although I don't know anything about that).

And so, how does he do it? Nobody really knows, but the current thinking is that, through practice, the player that receives the ball interprets the movements of the hitter and induces where the ball will likely be (with great precision), without actually using much information from the ball itself.

It's possible that, just as elite chess players can play without a board, elite tennis players could play without balls.

"A guide to a good life" was the first book on stoicism I read, that link was posted before and led me to it, and it really helped me a lot. I would also recommend the "Tao of Seneca" 3 PDFs that Tim Ferriss put together, the audiobooks are great because you can easily listen to a letter a day which helps me to build the habit of following stoicism.

Another book that really helped me was "The Inner Game of Tennis" https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...

At that level, it's generally known to be the mental preparation for the given day (along with a bit of luck, as you mentioned).

Indeed, everyone at that level has already been filtered and selected for similar top levels of skill, knowledge, conditioning, equipment, diet, coaches, etc., etc., etc. It comes down to the mental game both internally and between competitors on that particular day.

A classic book to understand some of this is The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey [0]

Source: I formerly competed at international levels for several years in alpine ski racing (mostly DH/Super-G), and studied neuroscience in college as a result of the many fascinating mental phenomena I found in training and competing.

One very interesting fact I came across in neuroscience is that perceptual thresholds for relevant senses, e.g., touch sensitivity for a musician, are about 10X finer than normal people (i.e., they can detect physical differences only 10% the size of that detectable by normal population), and that this is trainable. So yes, this is definitely on the skill/ training side, agreeing with the author.

OTOH, I know some top level musicians who quickly point out that the people with insane levels of desire, motivation, and hard work who will never get to the level to pass a professional audition. But I haven't further data to see what is the issue (does it come to talent, or some genetic shortcoming in their sensory-motor systems, or have they self-sabotaged, or what 20 other factors?)

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...

Some of the concepts I picked up from it:

- Practice something enough to get to the point where you can perform the act/task without thinking. Your brain will then be freed up to focus on higher level things. Picture yourself moving up different levels of a pyramid.

This is also how you can slow things down in your mind. Because you've experienced something so much, your brain doesn't have to do as much processing. He talks about this in depth, The Inner Game of Tennis talks about it, and one or two other books I read this year mentioned this concept.

- Invest in loss. Most entrepreneurs have heard this 1,000 times, but it was still great to read his take on it. He couldn't get better without experiencing a little pain in practice.

- Don't fight, avoid, or deny negative forces. Instead, you should look to channel what's coming at you into something positive. He talks about the chess player who would play mental tricks on him or kick him under the table. It through him off at first, but he learned to embrace it and overcome it.

- Find a trigger zone. Develop a routine that will get you ready for peak performance. It could be for Tai Chi or a business meeting (which he gives an example of).

There is a lot more to the book, but those are a few of the main concepts he talks about.

A lot of the other posters have given some great advice from a technical perspective. I'd suggest taking some time to evaluate and improve your mental health as well. If you're putting yourself under so much pressure, that pressure alone will hold you back to a great extent.

First off, just relax. Take a little time off to reset your psyche, overcome your burnout, and rediscover your confidence/interest. It's amazing what taking a week off can do.

Take up some activities that have been shown to help with stress relief. Meditation. Exercise. Long walks. Digital disconnects. Healthy sleep cycle.

Read this book: The Inner Game of Tennis. It's a short read, but it will transform the way you approach high-pressure situations.

You mentioned PTSD - do you actually have PTSD, anxiety, or other similar mental health problems? If so, talk to a counselor or find some way to address those underlying issues.

You have a long career window ahead of you, so don't burn yourself out at this point. Job prospects are great for CS majors, and you seem like a guy who's very motivated and hard working. Spend a bit of time taking care of yourself, and I'm sure you'll be fine in the long haul.

This state of mind, 'conscious unconsciousness', trains your Self 2 to execute. I don't know why it takes so long for the subconscious to learn, but muscle memory does develop.

Most people think these people are training their Self 1, as if studying music theory will guide their hand, unconsciously, up the scales. It doesn't work that way. You can't memorize a compound bend on guitar, you can't memorize a double stop on a violin. Self 1, as important as it imagines itself, cannot play music all by itself. There are far too many notes in any song to consciously focus on each one as it passes. You have to rely on muscle memory to get you through.

Keeping that feedback loop open is about as hard as maintaining averted vision in the night sky. Or staring into a Magic Eye. You've got to relax and focus.

[1] you'll have to read the book. Self 1 observes & directs, Self 2 executes. Roughly, Self 1 is conscious, Self 2 is subconscious.

Immediately upon its posthumous publication in 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was hailed as a masterpiece, and the ensuing years have confirmed this initial assessment. Today it is widely acknowledged to be the single most important philosophical work of the twentieth century.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has had a huge impact. From Amazon: "Translated into more than seventeen languages, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the world's most widely used drawing instruction book."

Same with The Inner Game of Tennis -- it was groundbreaking when it came out in 1972 and had a huge impact not just on tennis, or even sports generally, but on musicians, artists, performers, or anything with a critical mental game. Back when I was working on my music degree it was required reading.

Is it possible that the author thinks these books are undervalued simply because many of them were released a while ago (when he was young or not yet born) and thus they aren't currently being hyped and/or in the limelight? That, or perhaps they're simply not that popular within the author's social circle?

Except when it's not.

It hold advices that can be generalized to improve your ability to learn without using analysis and develop natural actions in a given field.

Apply it to social interactions. Those are much better for everyone involved when you mostly instinctively react, yet subtly adjust using logic, not the opposite.

The Inner Game of Tennis, by Timothy Gallwey

Yes... yes! I'll gladly recommend this over any book of philosophy. (Different philosophers click with different people.) Granted, I was thirteen and a tennis player when I first read it, but I haven't played tennis seriously in over twenty years, and I still use the lessons in this book any time I practice anything physical. Dancing, chopping onions, running, lifting weights, you name it. I use it anytime I need to do something where the real intelligence at work is not part of my conscious mind, including controlling my emotions, but it works best with physical skills.

Gallwey wrote some other "Inner Game" books, but he was a Division I college tennis player, and this was his first book. This is the book he wrote about the sport he knew, without knowing it would be a best-seller. I don't know if the others were written to the same level of quality.

On overcoming cognitive bias (and understanding how mindsets influence motivation, personality, and behavior):
Self-Theories by Carol S. Dweck

Mental peformance:
The Inner Game of Tennis - The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

Mental Models on influence:
Influencer: The Power to Change Anything

Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

The Prince - Nicollo Machiavelli

Being Mortal - Atul Gawande

High Output Management - Andrew Grove

Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance

Red Plenty - Francis Spufford

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

The Four Agreements - Don Miguel Ruiz

The Inner Game of Tennis - W. Timothy Galleway

My Gita - Devdutt Pattanaik

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Istanbul - Orhan Pamuk

The Stranger - Albert Camus

I don't think all explanation is redundant and counter-productive, but a lot of it is. I think it is useful to demonstrate how and explain why. If a stufmdent can internalize the correct motivation of why that can help choose which skill or technique to apply.