Book recommendations
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Excellent book for those who want to learn how to form good habits easily or break bad ones. Also, its 1% compounding effect description is amazing, inspirational and motivational.
Sapiens: A brief history of humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Interesting take on history of the world in which history and philosophy mix to create tantalizing read.
The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
This book is being called "Marie Condo for your brain" and I find this comparison very suitable :-) Two thoughts really resonated with me. The first one is "freedom is being disliked by other people" and the other is "happines is the feeling of contribution". So simple yet so deep.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Highly recommended book to gain insights into sleep and its value. You'll re-think late night alcohol beverages, Netflix binges and staring at screens :) Somewhat disturbing facts which some articles already disproved so take everything with a grain of salt (or two).
Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers
This short book (which if you put your mind to it can be read in a couple of hours) is so filled with great advice that I implore you to read it multiple times. Derek Sivers, the creator of CD Baby is describing his success and his failures in a series of short lessons where each one has a great takeaway. Some of the best quotes for me are "Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what's not working" and "No 'yes'. Either 'Hell yeah!' or 'no.'"
Influence: The Psychology of Persuassion by Robert B. Cialdini
I'd recommend it to anyone interested in influencing and persuading people to say yes. Principles explained in the book are not that unknown but are explained in detail. Explained how and why they work and are accompanied with great examples.
Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss
One of the best books on the subject of negotiation with a lot of examples of how to use the knowledge in your daily life. Not just for negotiating hostage situations. I've been using some of the tips when I'm 'negotiating' dinner plans with my girlfriend and so far I've been 100% successful :-)
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott
Whether you are a boss, or have one you need to read this book. Its simple framework of challenging directly and caring personally is really powerful. I've thought I was being radically candor when I was obnoxuiously aggressive and by reading this amazing book I now know the difference and how to progress from undesired behaviour to desired one.
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE by Phil Knight
Everybody and their grandma keep recommending this book. Both friends and influencers whose recommendation I usually like so I felt compelled to read it. To be frank I don't get what the fuss with this book is all about. There are definitely better biography / memoir books out there. Almost no mentioning of Jordan, Kobe or Tiger. Most of the book is focused on 'ancient' history when they were only re-selling other brands. I don't regret reading the book but nothing more than that.
Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything by BJ Fogg
As I've read the Atomic Habits by James Clear earlier, I was aware of the importance of starting small but, I just wasn't aware how small (or tiny) can you go. The principle of B = MAP (behavior = motivation * ability * prompt) is explained in several ways in the book and the methods accompanying it are brilliant. There are 300 tiny habits and the end of the book to get inspired with and, they are very useful.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The book was highly recommended by a lot of people and after reading it failed to grasp why. Maybe I couldn't get in its flow and couldn't appreciate it? :-) The book isn't bad, but I didn't find anything new that I haven't learned already. Perhaps it was such a big and worthy idea that many authors were inspired by. Maybe I've just started reading it too late.
How to Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion by Derek Sivers
Extremely short book that you'll gulp down in one sitting. Each chapter/answer contradicts with one another which forces you to think really hard how to process it and adjust the ideas to fit within your context. And this is what it makes this book so amazing! My favourite chapter is definitely "Make a million mistakes".
The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
The whole Three-Body triology is amazing and definitely worth reading and one of the better SF series in my opinion. "The Dark Forest" (second book in the series) contains one of the most memorable definition of love: "For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and the template. If they can get used to those differences, then they can be together. If not, they split up. It's as simple as that."
Evidence-Guided: Creating High Impact Products in the Face of Uncertainty by Itamar Gilad
Although this book is intended for project and product managers, every developer can learn a lot from it. Biggest takeaways are definitely the importance of evidence-based decision making vs opinion-based decision making, the importance of understanding the problem you're trying to solve before jumping into solutions, the GIST framework (goals, ideas, steps and tasks) and ICE (impact, confidence and ease) scoring model for work priorization. Oh, and north star metric and how to define value-delivered and value-captured organization goals.
Podcast recommendations
Full Stack Radio
Amazing podcasts for web developers where host Adam Wathan has awesome guests and asks all the right questions. I just can't single out any episode because all of them are interesing.
How I Built This with Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman (of Reddit fame)
Most of the HIBT episods are great but this one is special. Chemistry between Alexis and Steve exudes through headphones.
The Joe Rogan Experience #1309 with Naval Ravikant
If you're not familiar with Naval Ravikant stop with what you're doing immediately and go listen to him being interviewed by a Joe Rogan on his podcast. It's 2 hours long but well worth it. Too many wisdom bits from Naval too summarise here.
The Tim Ferriss Show with Derek Sivers (of CD Baby fame)
Tim Ferris is an amazing host and almost every episode is worth listening to but the one with Derek Sivers is pure gold.
The Knowledge Project Podcast #100 with Matt Mullenweg
Most Farnam Street (The Knowledge Project) podcast episodes are awesome but the one with Matt Mullenweg from WordPress stands out for me. They discuss remote work (Matt rather calls it distributed) and different levels of it. Matt's saying "Words create reality" was something that moved me unexpectedly and was real food for thought. And I can not get over how soothing Matt Mullenweg voice sounds :-)
The Knowledge Project Podcast #88 with Derek Sivers
Derek Sivers is the bomb! He gives so many great nuggets here you'll have to listen to it at least twice. From his life philosophy, through book recommendations, to some intimate life details in a calm and rational matter. And all of this filled with jokes - he became minimalist because "he had to move houses couple of times" :-D
The Tim Ferriss Show #547 with Balaji Srinivasan
Definitely the episode with the highest ratio of wisdom per minute :-) My mind was blown when I heard the idea of using Bitcoin mining as energy storage for wind and solar! And after you listen to this episode, make sure to check the previous Tim Ferris episode with Balaji.