What I Just Read

A book about heeding the miraculous cognitive process we call intuition, "a brilliant internal guardian" that enables us to perceive things before they happen. This book give you a tremendous set of tools for assessing risks, making predictions, and understanding which things you should (and shouldn't!) be afraid of. This book is a wonderful navigational tool for modernity. I'll add that aside from being an insightful guy, author Gavin de Becker is quite an interesting guy. I recommend digging into any of the podcasts or long-form interviews he's done. See for example  this interview with Tucker Carlson , striking in part because Carlson (for once) hardly talks--he simply lets de Becker talk. [Again, please skip or skim these notes below, they are too long and life is short!] Notes:   Chapter 1: In the Presence of Danger 1) "Like every creature, you can know when you are in the presence of danger. You have the gift of a brilliant internal guardian that stand

This isn't space opera (as certain adulatory reviewers call it), it's space narcissism. The two main characters, Red and Blue, are opposing superagents in a time war, traveling wherever and whenever they wish, manipulating and destroying people, cities, even civilizations, to further their side's agenda. They begin writing letters back and forth to each other as sort of a masturbatory exercise in mutual approval, then fall in love.  It's  Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence  with a time travel plot wrapper. Remember: the garden-variety narcissist is the star of his or her own movie: everyone else is an extra . And this book takes modern narcissism to new heights: While Red and Blue enjoy the drug of attention from each other, not just other people  but entire civilizations  are their extras. Worse, this reader found himself totally indifferent to the fates of these two characters. Finally and worst of all, the authors seem indifferent to their own story

If you like Malcolm Gladwell-style writing you'll like this book: it has lots of often cutesy, counter-intuitive stories and plenty of "studies show" scientific studies that prove the author's points (naturally) throughout. It makes the book a diverting and easy read. Plenty of ideas in here to think about too if you'd like to get better at courting serendipity and insight in your day-to-day and/or professional life. All in all, a fairly useful book.  Notes:   * Kind learning environments (chess) versus wicked learning environments (reality).  * Cognitive entrenchment  * Rule seeking behavior... Learning by multiple choice or if/then statements. Why giving hints or supplying rules does not help you learn, where the appearance of learning isn't actual learning.  * "Easy learning" versus more "difficult learning," where more difficult learning actually sticks.  * Your perceptions of your own learning can be misleading. if it seems like it'

This is a foundational book in the canon of personal development literature, dating orginally from 1989. It is excellent . It's also dense, and I mean this positively. There's a lot of carefully, intricately thought-out value here. Almost every page in this book has some useful thought worth writing down and applying to your life. I found myself carefully reading and re-reading passages. Very few personal development books offer this kind of heft. This is the type of book that you have to work at, but are generously repaid for your effort. In fact, I attempted (and failed) to read this book some twenty years ago: this reflects my character (and attention span) at that time rather than the value of the book. I simply wasn't ready. I wasn't willing to put in the effort. One final thought about reading this book at the particular stage of life I'm at right now: I realize that many of the things that I'd like to do in life I'll likely never do, and that I've