Book Reviews

An epic 3-year project from Malcolm Gladwell about how bad we are at knowing other humans. The key takeaway for me was that it’s hubris to assume that one can know another person. Spies, CIA interrogators, judges, police – none of them can tell when someone is lying, none of them can predict with any decent hit rate a future choice someone will make. We assume the best in other people, until the opposing evidence becomes impossible to ignore (an extremely high threshold for most)....

Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world, and why things are better than you think. The crowning jewel of one man’s life work. One of the most important books Bill Gates has ever read. Hans Rosling’s Factfulness is a bit of a masterpiece. The team behind Factfulness is the same team that’s developed https://www.gapminder.org/ There are ten instincts that guide us astray when it comes to interpreting how the world is really developing....

Symposium is an ancient classic, it’s super short, and reading it in 2020 sets off a total clusterfuck of associative thoughts that I felt an extreme need to try to organise and reflect on. So here goes. What it is: Symposium is a story from The Dialogues of Plato, which essentially means it’s something Plato once heard someone say that they heard someone else say. It’s still an epic reflection of life in Greece 400 years BC....

Range by David Epstein is a simple book, in many ways. Simple in its core message, simple in structure, and simple to remember. The core message could easily have been summed up in a 2-pager, but it wouldn’t be compelling without reading through all the argumentation and examples. When learning to solve problems in an unkind learning environment (that’s most of life) it’s preferable to have range across many fields rather than specialisation in one field....

Another lil’ sneaky by Simon Sinek. This book has value, but I was not ready to extract that value on my first pass-through. I will have to revisit the book at a more opportune time in my life to get the full juice out of it. The idea is simple, and I embrace it – we cannot win at life. We play the game to perpetuate the game. It’s a book that invites an existential crisis in many ways....