Hacker News Books

Any books from Thich Nhat Hanh.

The miracle of mindfulness, No mud/No Lotus, How to Love ...

* Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig

* The miracle of mindfulness - Thich Nhat Hanh

* Letters from a stoic - Seneca

* Amusing ourselves to death (Neil Postman) (combined with 1984 by Orwell and Brave New World by Huxley)

* Zen mind, beginner's mind - Shunryu Suzuki

* Walden - Henry David Thoreau

I bookmarked link to this study some time ago - http://phys.org/news/2011-01-mindfulness-meditation-brain-we...

I've also read "the miracle of mindfulness" which was a pretty good read. You can find a pdf quickly if you know how to use google ;)

I would love to see some more scientific studies on how meditation affects one's brain. I'm not a big fan of all those "metaphysical" writings on meditation. I'd like to treat it more like a consciousness training.

Meditation. Download a free 20-minute guided meditation and do it every day. Maybe at some point read "The Miracle of Mindfulness" by Thich Nhat Hanh.

I can provide a good guided breathing meditation on request.

Meditation will help you be calm and focused. It will help you recognize and work through emotions with a minimum of harm to yourself or others.

I'm definitely not advocating self-immolation, but the same training that let monks sit calmly as they burned to death in the 60s (in an attempt to call attention to the horrifying war in Vietnam) will definitely help you deal with your breakup, illness, work troubles, or loss of a loved one.

The modern use of the word was spawned by a book by Thích Nhất Hạnh[0] called The Miracle of Mindfulness. It was then codified into clinical practice by (among others) Marsha Linehan, who incorporated the book's ideas (in combination with behavioural therapy) as dialectical behavioural therapy, which was the first evidence-based treatment for borderline personality disorder[1]. Since then it's been a prominent feature of popular psychology (and real psychology, though in a more restricted context).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Nh%E1%BA%A5t_H%E1%B...
[1]: Linehan M., Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder

I read The Inner Game of Tennis based on Alan Kay's description in a youtube video. It is an excellent book.

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.

I've read maybe a dozen books on vipassana meditation (the type usually posted to HN), zen, and mindfulness. The two best practical books on meditation I've read are:

1. The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh

2. Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana. This one is free online, though the paid copy is a bit more edited for clarity.

My primary guide is 1. It's concise and provides just the right amount of breathing exercises to help me focus while I "sit." 2 is more comprehensive but I've found it a bit too scattered, with too many tools to help with breathing that I go in circles attempting different ones. Most people I think employ a couple and ignore the rest. 1 is much better written and just a more cohesive book than 2 IMO, but they're both great books and either one alone works well as a guide to meditating.

1. The One Thing. ~ Gary Keller
2. Mini Habits. ~ Stephen Guise
3. Learned Optimism. ~ Martin Seligman
4. Spark. ~ John Ratey
5. Miracle of Mindfulness. ~ Thich nhat hanh

The mindfulness excerpt is from Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn's The Miracle of Mindfulness

> While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes. This means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly. Why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that’s precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There’s no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.

+1 for the miracle of mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. Ive tried to read a couple of other books about Zen and meditation - but I think that book was the best. Ive written a short summary about it here including a video from a meditation session at Google: http://blog.habrador.com/2012/06/whats-up-with-zen-part-2-th...

Good luck! Money's still out there for entrepreneurs.

The Miracle of Mindfulness was a good read. Actually, the first ten pages was enough for me. It got me to try being totally mindful for a morning as I went about my affairs, and that stuck with me. I am solidly in the present most of the time.

Letters from a stoic is what I read for Seneca. He taught me that we will lose everything eventually, but accepting this lets us enjoy what we have without fear. And he taught me to rehearse any scenarios I fear and write them down, to see that they're ultimately not so bad, or the common fate of us all.

I liked Seneca's letters from a Stoic, and the miracle of mindfulness. There's also some helpful exercises in the four hour workweek (writing down worst case scenarios), and bits of the Black Swan were formative.

Of course, a big part of the latter two books was also structuring my life so I don't have situations where I need to deal with office politics as part of my livelihood. But I can confirm that the techniques do work for very real stresses I've had that can't be avoided.

It reminds me of a point of view of one of Thich Nhat Hanh's friends, mentioned in his book "The Miracle of Mindfulness".

The gist of it was his friend was discussing spending time with his kids. He would view something like the concert Patterico mentioned as "his time" and sitting in the car with a crying baby as "the kid's time". He simply decided to start viewing "the kid's time" as "his time", he was choosing to spend quality time with his children.