@avneesh – Thank you for your kind words and your query
I don’t think books are all that matters in acquiring wisdom, though they do help in democratising knowledge. I have some strong opinions on personal development but I don’t know if this is the right forum or thread to talk about them. I strongly believe we owe it to society to develop ourselves continuously until death. I don’t mean this lightly – I think the moment we stop learning, we are dead.
To that effect, I think we should focus on learning about a variety of topics – from business, health, mindfulness, software development, ai, physics, math, economics, spirituality, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, biology, history and so on. It doesn’t have to be everything all the time – but a focus on everything over the entire lifetime, but with at least something all the time – something that makes you want to wake up and learn at that point of time in life – it could be how guitars are made, or supply chain of metformin or bicameralism or burger wrapping.
Some of the best books to do so are already in this thread. A complete life-altering cache of books wouldn’t cost more than 10-20k (starting with the 11/10 or 10/10 books in this thread) and might probably be the best investment. The bigger investment is not money but in one’s own time and handling society’s expectations of reading pointless books (see the apologetic note on which I have started this reply)
Practical skills – Few things I learnt a bit late, because of the way I was geared – collaboration and team work. I realised while reading books like “the idea factory” or “loonshots” that it takes more than one person to do extraordinary things. This got reinforced for me in my somewhat first and last work gig which was a disaster of sorts but it taught me how to work with others to build something better. Most of my ability to collaborate stems from this failed gig. I think its important to put yourself in bad situations for short periods of time (nothing spirit-sucking) so these things can be learnt.
Our education system is geared to make it feel like a finite game but in reality learning is an infinite game (check ‘finite and infinite games’ summary in this thread to understand what I mean). It is important to unlearn a lot that our industrial education gives us before we can grasp this and make progress – our education in my opinion is the equivalent of mcdonald’s food. Great when you are poor and hungry but by no means the most enriching when you can afford better (not just in terms of money but in terms of straying from society’s expectations)
This is a thing that I think about almost everyday but my thoughts aren’t very refined yet. I hope that’s helpful.
| Subscribe To Our Free Newsletter |
