In a previous article we put together a list of books that would help you become more intelligent (by the way, practically any book will make you more intelligent than someone who doesn’t read). This time we want to mention some truly inspiring books that can genuinely change the way you see life or the way you perceive reality.
1. Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert
Some time ago I took a few points from this book for our article “The surprising truth about what really makes us happy in life“.
The message of this book doesn’t fit with many other books about happiness, because it starts from the premise that you don’t even know what the heck makes you happy, so why should you stress about it?
Daniel Gilbert, a well-known Harvard psychologist and the author of this book, likes to describe unusual experiments that show how biased and flawed our minds are. Throughout the book he shows you again and again how we misjudge what made us happy in the past, what will make us happy in the future and what makes us happy right now.
After decades of research on happiness, one firm conclusion can be drawn: happiness has very little to do with what happens to us in our lives, and a lot to do with how we end up seeing things.
Gilbert’s theory is that we have a kind of psychological immune system that basically deals with all the crap that happens to us. But at some point that immune system fails, and we can fall into a depressive state or a prolonged depression, as well as existential crises.
Why would people who can see pay more to avoid going blind than a blind person would pay to get their sight back? An interesting question, and even more interesting is the answer Gilbert gives us in the book.
This book has been described as the cleverest and best-written psychology book anyone has ever read. Personally, together with Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, that is how I see it.
2. Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I like Taleb’s style and his very particular view and explanation of certain events. You may agree with him or not, but you will rarely be able to say for sure that Taleb is wrong in his arguments. He already did it with The Black Swan and with Fooled by Randomness.
Now, with Antifragile, we learn what its subtitle promises: how to benefit from disorder.
Often, the most influential events in history are, by definition, the ones that could not be anticipated.
These are called “black swans”. For Taleb, Google and Facebook are black swans: we could not say they succeeded because of what they did, since what they did was exactly the same as hundreds of companies had done before without success. Still, at least they were on the playing field. If you don’t play, you don’t win.
As humans, we have numerous cognitive biases, and there is one built-in cognitive bias that stops us noticing both the number of random events that happen in our lives and the impact those random events have on us.
See also: 6 steps to help you get over a business failure
What Taleb proposes, and what is really interesting, is how to build systems that are “antifragile” and how to build our lives so that we benefit from major unforeseen events.
A highly recommended book that will undoubtedly change the way you see certain things.
3. The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer
In my opinion, this book can literally save lives, or keep young people from wasting their time (and, in some cases, their lives).
In it we find an explanation of why people give up their identities for some insane cause. It explains why people surrender to fanaticism and to extremist ideologies.
It explains the nature of mass movements and how fanaticism sometimes disguises itself as progress and modernity.
In my opinion, I would describe this book as “a good slap in the face for a large part of society”, if you’ll pardon the expression.
As I discover more books of this kind, I will keep updating this article.
See also: 9 books that shaped Jeff Bezos’s way of thinking
Featured image: Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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