Hacker News Books

Agreed on having the right mindset. Dalai Lama's "The book of Joy" is a good one talking about the perspectives that would help you navigate through difficult time and emotions.

Some examples:

* treating all human beings as a whole, which allows people to share happiness on other people's achievement - this kind of resonates with the theory of Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where it argues that the goal of all humans is to maximize the chance that the entire gene pool will continue to exist

* reduce sense of one's own identity - which helps people during hard times by thinking about how small one single person is compared to the entire race, maybe even the entire universe

And of course, there's the advocate around being grateful, being compassionate, do more meditation etc.

You might want to check out 'The Book of Joy' by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize winner and archbishop). The book lays out what these two men believe are the fundamental pillars of enduring happiness. Instead of doing a poor job summarizing the contents, here's a link to Amazon if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CZCW34Q. Wish you the best.

> I assume that the best part of the best books will surface in daily conversations, YouTube videos, CliffsNotes, podcasts, Reddit posts/comments, blog articles, etc

I don't think this is true. In theory, you may be able to find all the information contained in the books, but it's drowning in garbage. The benefit of books is that the information has been distilled for you. Good books distill information better than bad books.

> One issue for me is that books are a very big time investment. I read very slowly and I don't remember everything I read either.

I hardly read books any more, though I do enjoy a day of reading in the sun when it's warm. I listen to audiobooks while I'm traveling, working out, or doing housework.

> I have thousands of non-fiction (mostly self-improvement) books in my reading list on GoodReads, but almost never bother to read any.

Different folks will tell you different things, but for me, the following self-help content covered most of what I've read to date:

* Any Alan Watts lecture series - I listened to "Out of your mind" (listen to the whole thing)
* The Book of Joy (Dalai Lama and Desmond TuTu)
* Never split the Difference (Chris Voss)
* The hard thing about hard things (Ben Horowitz)

And then read (or listen to) whatever strikes your fancy.

The concentrated focus of books makes them stick better, in my opinion, than blog posts, online commentary, etc.

Took a break from Economics with Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, to go in a completely different direction with The Book of Joy by Douglas Abrams. Not sure whether I'm going to go back to Economics when I'm done or take another detour. I've got SO MANY on my list that are sitting on my shelf. Before those, it was Peopleware - Productive Projects and Teams by DeMarco and Lister.