Category Archives: Book Notes

A good mix of extreme sports stories, science, and practical advice. He uses action sports as a vehicle for flow triggers. Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, you feel your best and perform your best. Flow is a luxury in most domains, but necessary for action and adventure sports. My favorite part: you lose the inner critic in flow state.More

Date Read: 2020-02-09. How Strongly I Recommend it: 10/10

If you struggle to talk about feelings, this is a must-read. Powerful and short for how we communicate affection or love, after the in-love obsession phase. The way you show affection is how you want to be loved. We might speak different love languages so our acts of love might not fill our partner’s “love tanks”. Identify you love language and the other person’s, then learn and practice how to “speak” that love language. Empty “love tanks” get relationships trouble. It has good stories to teach the languages. 100 pages of the good stuff, then some other ideas and FAQs. More

It’s one of those you just have to read. Stories about concentration nazi camps. “Man needs the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task”.More

A book that gives some structure if you’re scattered mentally or thinking Nihilistically. Extracts amazing practical wisdom out of biblical stories. Addresses the resentment that tends to come with extreme agreeableness and those who tend to avoid conflict. Rule 11 is a 10/10. I recommend watching some of his lectures, he has a captivating way of speaking.More

If you’re high on agreeableness and neuroticism, the Vice of Compassion is a 10/10. A different angle on Patriarchy, antihuman behavior, and gender differences.More

Rating: 9/10

If you’re young and live in the US, it’s a 10/10. Great starter book on personal finance. Teaches a clever system to automate saving and guilt free spending. Has detailed recommendations of banks accounts and credit cards (check his website for updates before opening any). It’s sequenced as a six-weeks-to-do-list so you take action that gets you 85% there, with options for optimizing later (becoming more of an expert).More

Rating: 10/10.

If you’re conscientious, hard working, responsible, perfectionist, ambitious, it’s likely that your brain uses back pain (or other symptoms) to avoid experiencing powerful negative emotions like anger, anxiety and low self-esteem. Worse case scenario, if this book is a placebo, then it’s cheaper than chiropractor/acupuncture/massage/physical therapy/surgery.More

He becomes a chess expert, then starts from zero to become a Tai Chi expert. He shares his stories and insights on how to learn. Learning theories, Hermit Crab metaphor, downward spirals. Stress and Recovery, creating triggers to get into flow (the zone).More