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I think this is as good a time as any to share my favorite speech on this topic, This Is Water by David Foster Wallace[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

Amazing - perhaps my favorite graduation speech with "This is water" by David Foster Wallace (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction).

While I'm sure that David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water" is a beautiful essay on the value of life, its credibility was damaged when he killed himself. That's a pretty extreme lifehack.

You can find a more balanced/nuanced approach in David Foster Wallace's This is Water:

http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in...

The best and most honest commencement speech I've ever listened to was David Foster Wallace's to the Kenyon College graduating class of 2005 that has since been published as a short book. It's called "This is Water." There's a heavy liberal arts slant, but it's a great speech.

http://vimeo.com/57350121 (audio)

Hey,

I'm 23 years old and in the same boat. Was always a cheerful person, but I've found myself becoming ruder, more curt, and always on edge as if everyone is out to argue/fight. I'm finding it tough working in an office environment where lots of things are annoying me and making it hard for me to not snap at people.

Good luck to you and hope we can figure something out.

In addition to This is Water, I really recommend How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Slaughterhouse Five.

Cheers :)

Your question reminded me of this quote from David Foster Wallace's This is Water:

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

I'm not sure I understand how anyone can plagiarize themselves either. Isn't that just called "recycling your own material"? For example, several parts of David Foster Wallace's speech/book This Is Water are pretty much verbatim from Infinite Jest. Or what about authors who are pushing ideologies and repeat themselves a lot? For example, there's a lot of overlap between Ayn Rand's novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Isn't this just what writers do?

I always go back to "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace. Not technically a book (It was a commencement speech). I keep the pdf on my phone. Puts things in perspective for me when I'm feeling overwhelmed.

http://metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf

"This is Water", a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace. Whenever I'm overwhelmed with life, stressed about work or relationships or whatever, I read this. I keep it in the kindle app on my phone specifically for that purpose.
https://www.docdroid.net/n9UgjO3/this-is-water.pdf

"This is water", by David Foster Wallace.

https://youtu.be/8CrOL-ydFMI

Yes, I know that feeling. I had This is Water essay by David Foster Wallace in an email and I couldn't find it and the page I had bookmarked was gone too. I was so upset. The essay keeps coming back in my thoughts.

For me, this is one of those things where the distributions have different skew. I think the median example of less simple writing is indeed worse than the median example of simple writing, but that the graphs cross at some point to the right of that, such that better examples of less simple writing are better than better examples of simple writing, and great examples of less simple writing are much better than great examples of simple writing. (I recognize that this is all subjective, but this is how I think about it.)

The genre also matters a lot. For sure I think simple writing is the better choice for Graham's topics, but I think it's much more open for fictional writing, and that some kinds of non fiction essays also benefit from less simplicity (again, keeping in mind the distribution effect discussed above).

For instance, one of my favorite essays is David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water". It is not simple, but it is much more effective than an essay using simple language to make the point that we often don't realize the things that we are immersed in. But I come across examples of this by good writers who do not usually use simple language who I believe are usually more compelling than writers like Graham.

"This Is Water" speech, by David Wallace.

Link: http://www.befreetoday.com.au/this-is-water/

1. Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
2. Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker

3. Tribes by Seth Godin

4. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

5. The Industries of the Future by Alex Ross

6. Bigger, Leaner, Stronger by Michael Matthews

7. The Science of Getting Rich: Financial Success Through Creative Thought by WALLACE D. WATTLES (The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reads)

8. Money: Master the Game by Tony Robbins

9. Principles by Ray Dalio

10. Como Ganar Amigas e Influir Sobre las Personas by Dale Carnegie

11. Without Their Permission by Alexis Ohanian

12. Tribe by Sebastian Junger

13. Sapiens A Brief History of Humanity by Yuval Noah Harari

14. This is Water by David Foster Wallace

15. How Not to Be Wrong. The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg

16. Walt Disney By Neal Gabler

17. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

18. Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger

19. The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason

20. A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine

Out of all these, I would recommend only a few:

- Sapiens

- The Rational Optimist

- Walt Disney By Neal Gabler

- How Not to Be Wrong. The Power of Mathematical Thinking.

- A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

I haven’t read much of DFW outside of This Is Water [0]. In it he seems very aware of the outlook of contempt [1] folk of his intellectual milieu have for certain other segments of society and presents the case for reframing that viewpoint.

0. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

1. http://www.econtalk.org/arthur-brooks-on-love-your-enemies/

My first exposure to DFW was his essay "The Big Red Son" (http://social.rollins.edu/wpsites/sexwarandplague/files/2012...) and, boy, what an experience that was! I think that essay is even better than "Consider the Lobster".

And if haven't already done so, read his commencement speech to Kenyon College class of 2005, or better listen to it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI) (Later published as a book titled This is Water). It's a life-enhancing experience.