Not everything you think you know is right. Sometimes your way of thinking may be fundamentally wrong. Luckily, there are some excellent books that can literally change the way you think, while also being enjoyable and entertaining reads.
So this time we recommend these books, which will not only shake up your preconceived beliefs but will also help you think more sensibly, making you smarter and opening your mind to other ways of thinking.
See also: 3 books that will help you break bad habits
Books that will change the way you think
1. Fooled by Randomness
Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the famous The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, this book again deals with randomness in our lives and in our success. Some people look for strokes of luck, when the truth is that you need skills and hard work to achieve anything. Others believe success comes down to skill, but ignore the luck factor.
Through different stories and cases, the author explains the traps of luck and randomness. One way or another, it will change the way you think, and you’ll be more alert than ever to make all of this work in your favour.
2. The Wisdom of Crowds
An expert can be outperformed by crowds, even when the crowd knows nothing about the subject. One of the examples in the book involves guessing the weight of an animal. An expert who had spent his whole life dealing with these animals estimated roughly how much the animal would weigh. Separately, the public was asked to estimate its weight. Some guessed considerably too high and others too low, but, curiously, when the arithmetic mean of the whole crowd’s guesses was worked out, it came much closer to the real weight than the expert’s estimate.
See also: Which books to read to become smarter, open your mind and make better decisions
At other times, groupthink can even be dangerous. So you need to know when to listen to the crowd and when to listen to the expert. And that, basically, is what James Surowiecki teaches you throughout this book.
3. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Success stories, advertising campaigns and ideas with staying power all share the same characteristics: they are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible and emotional, and they tell a unified story. Whether you’re a manager or an employee, unemployed or a homemaker, you’ll constantly have to communicate ideas. The book starts from the premise that it’s hard to change other people’s way of thinking, and just as hard to convey ideas so that they are accepted. That’s what you’ll learn in this book, and it will change the way you think about it.
4. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Daniel Pink, author of one of the books we most highly recommend (To Sell Is Human), talks here about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and what influences each type. He’ll also teach you how to improve your productivity and inspire others.
5. Quiet: The Power of Introverts
In a world that can’t stop talking, both introverts and extroverts have extremely valuable qualities for the people around them, but these personalities need different spaces and treatment to reach their full potential.
Susan Cain reveals the differences between introverts and extroverts and how the talents of both personality types can be combined to achieve a certain degree of success.
6. The Happiness Hypothesis
Finding the meaning of life and happiness is something people have searched for since the beginning of time. Today, scientific research reaches conclusions that other, ancient civilisations had in one way or another already arrived at. So Jonathan Haidt uses ancient texts from other cultures to take us on a tour of the thinking of the ancients, showing us the path to happiness.
Further reading
Featured image: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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