Hacker News Books

brilliant post. there is a fine line here but imagine a world in which criticism was not the knee jerk reaction? not just in business but in general. at school, in the playground, on the playing field, in politics. it makes me think of 2 things: Ben Zander's "the art of possibility" and something else that I can't remember right now.

>much better off than any of my family before me

How so? I doubt it. That sounds like a terrible life, with no enjoyment in it of any kind. A life worth living doesn't build itself! Really sounds like you are torturing yourself. Being very mean to yourself. It's easy to do - we aren't taught that you are someone in your life you have to be kind to, the most important person in fact, as it's virtually impossible to love others while being so mean to yourself. I had to learn about loving myself. Treat yourself like you would treat someone you really love.

Imagine someone you really really love, then you forcing them to live how you are living. Doing a job they hate, no friends or family visits, not involved in anything, no joy or pleasure in life.. It would be obvious that it's a very cruel way to treat someone, amounting to torture. People don't enjoy those things, or being deprived of so many things. What things do people enjoy? Imagine a rich, fulfilling life, and work on giving that to the person you love - yourself.

Self-help books helped me a lot with this stuff. They're the main thing that helped, I guess, apart from being directly inspired by other people and inspiring books. Everyone has their own favourites, but some that helped me - SARK's first half-dozen books, Paul Kurtz Exuberance, Carol Lloyd Creating a Life Worth Living, Joanna Field/Marion Milner's books starting with A Life of One's Own, Richard Bach books, Austin Kleon books, Zen and the Art of Making a Living, Tristine Rainer The New Diary, Ben Zander The Art of Possibility, Gracian's The Art of Wordly Wisdom. Montaigne. Plutarch. Emerson. Susan Faludi's Stiffed may help you understand yourself, your world, your work, your life better than any of these. Good luck!

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. – Oscar Wilde

The book The Art of Possibility has a good chapter about this. It's also a great book in general; it's Rosamund & Ben Zander's philosophy of life disguised as a self-help book, in the same way that The Black Swan is basically Taleb's ideas about epistemology disguised as investment advice. The ideas aren't super unique, but they do a better job selling them than I've seen anywhere else.

Too many to mention. A list of books I've read more times than any others - many times each:

SARK's first 4-5 books, Robert Fulghum's books, Emerson's essays, Hazlitt's essays, Bertrand Russell's essays (e.g. Sceptical Essays, Unpopular Essays), GK Chesterton's essays and his book Heretics, Nietzsche's books, William James' essays, RL Stevenson's essays, La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, La Bruyere's Characters, Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, Ben Zander's The Art of Possibility...

You should read the article I linked to! Sadly it was a bit too long to paste the whole thing.

When I was younger, my father gave me a thick and nauseating compendium labelled The University of Success, filled with extracts from vacuous books of the kind Chesterton talks about. I guess he thought I wasn't 'successful', and it would teach me how! By then I'd already read and got a lot from some of the useful books in the field - Awaken the Giant Within, Life 101, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The New Guide to Rational Living, Effortless Mastery, The Art of Possibility etc. For the kind of success I value most, I've been inspired for decades by, and owe the most to, writers such as Robert Fulghum, SARK, and most of all, Emerson.

I saw that the whole thing was made up and that the game of success was just that, a game. I realized I could invent another game. I settled on a game called I am a contribution. Unlike success and failure, contribution has no other side... "How will I be a contribution today?" ...
Just look carefully at the cover of the box, and if the rules do not light up your life, put it away, take out another one you like better, and play the game wholeheartedly. Remember, it's all invented. - Ben Zander, The Art of Possibility

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you usually succeed interestingly. - Edward Albee

While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior. - Henry C. Link

Most people die of a kind of creeping common sense. They discover too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes. - Oscar Wilde

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits. - R. L. Stevenson

We do not know to-day whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. - Emerson

Hard Times. In this contradictory world of Truth the hard times come when the good times are in the world of commerce; namely, sleep, fulleating, plenty of money, care of it, and leisure; these are the hard times. Nothing is doing and we lose every day. - Emerson, journal