My Bookshelf

I read the entire book on a transatlantic flight. That might have been a mistake because a few days later, I literally could not remember a single tip. Either that, or they were all forgettable.

Quick, enjoyable read. Full of both practical tips and strong motivation (mostly in the form of highly relevant quotes). I didn’t expect to think so deeply about my life and future when reading this. Recommended.

A lot of people “build in public” these days, but many more are afraid to share, or rarely do. But really, showing your work online will change your life. (Give it a few years.)

It’s easy to doubt yourself when your intuition is to go counter to what most companies seem to be doing. So these pointers, coming from the makers of such a successful software company, are quite reassuring.

Some advice that must have been radical at the time this book was written is thankfully common practice now. But so much still isn’t! Old misguided ideas stick around despite all the evidence that it’s not working.

Read Getting Real online ↗

It’s a high level overview of the mindset and techniques that help you discover and build successful technology products. While reading, I was creating and updating a mental checklist—like, “OK, I’m already doing this… But not that; at least not to that degree.”

It gave me reassurance (you’ve got the right mindset) and tough love advice on how to do better. The author repeats himself a lot, which I found good for a book that’s supposed to induce mindset change. But it doesn’t go in depth on anything; it points you to other books for that.

“I have a few caveats concerning what this book is not about. First, it is not a self‑help book for individuals, but rather for an entire culture.”

Reading the book felt like a respectful conversation with a person who’s different from me in every way, but whose life experiences, research and insights have a lot of relevancy to my own life.

It’s put a lot of ideas in my head, in a realistically optimistic way.

And I appreciated the 40+ pages of references with links for proof and further reading!

“When we build websites or apps, we often wait until the last minute to bring in designers to ‘apply’ design, or look and feel. This is akin to baking a cake and then hiring a baker to make it taste good.”

I laughed SO hard on every other page! 😂 But I also had a lot of aha-moments and “oh, that’s why that happened back then and this is how I could have done better”.

I was looking for a social cheat sheet, and while this was written for neurotypical adults who work with autistic children, it was still helpful. Reading things I was technically already aware of, but explained by people who think like me, was far more impactful. Some of it was informative and some useful, but a lot felt like giving up your values just to conform; and I refuse to do that.

Been meaning to read Animal Farm for years, never got around to it. Stumbled upon this beautiful adaptation in a bookstore and read it all on the spot.

It made me sad. Now I wanna read the actual book more than before. Wonder if it has more details. How do you go from egalitarian to totalitarian? It felt kinda… fake in the graphic novel. Like it could not possibly happen for real. But it does!

Loved some parts (e.g. “When you raise your price, you increase the value the consumer receives without changing anything else about your product”), hated some others (e.g. “if you wouldn’t club a baby seal to stay on as a customer, you don’t have to pay a penny”—yes, I assume it’s a joke, but it still makes me sick).

Overall, I’m glad I read this and was exposed to a new perspective—that’s the point of reading books! While I agree with the author on many philosophical points, I’m not convinced that fully embracing the capitalist system we live in is the best way forward as a society.

I love this way of thinking about pricing projects: ‘how do we make it so that it’s both a steal for you and lucrative for me? In other words, how do we both win?’

Just pondering this question can help us figure out what we really need from a project and how to get it.

A short read anyone would benefit from. Read it online here.

“Under neoliberalism, the technology of power takes on a subtle form. It does not lay hold of individuals directly. Instead, it ensures that individuals act on themselves so that power relations are interiorized—and then interpreted as freedom.”

Not the kind of book I would normally read if it hadn’t been personally recommended. None of the ideas strikes me as completely new, but they are well-developed and thought-provoking. That said, I found the language unnecessarily difficult and had to look up a lot of words. The author also assumes that you’re familiar with the writings of various philosophers that I hadn’t even heard of; but that makes it a nice introduction for further reading.

I can see there’s value in the insights within, but many of the anecdotes are a bit hard to believe.

Overall the book was highly entertaining! Whether it’ll prove to be helpful remains to be seen, but I’d definitely like my attitude to be more like the author’s.

“Power is not a means, it is an end.”

Extremely well written and gripping. But it also made me sick and, at times, prevented me from falling asleep.

“To die hating them, that was freedom.”

I wasn’t aware of the controversy surrounding Jordan Peterson when I started reading this book, but still noticed how he seemed to present some of his personal opinions as scientific fact (e.g. supposedly innate psychological difference between men and women), even though in most other cases he uses references to base his arguments on.

Despite its flaws, this is a good book, because it makes you think about various topics which we don’t usually discuss.

Incredibly well-written and captivating from the very first page. If you’d told me 3 months ago that an auto-biography would be among my favorite books ever, I would have laughed, but here we are. I highlighted over 20.000 words and feel a renewed drive to live and try things.

This book’s typesetting was gorgeous! Large, legible print on appealing pages.

I assumed it was a self-help book when I saw the title. It turns out it’s a business book—and a good one at that.

Super quick read (few pages, big letters). I know I’ll need to come back to it often to instill the teachings into my head.

This was a slow read with multiple breaks. The content was insightful but I don’t currently suffer from any pain. Nevertheless, I think reading this is good prevention. Everyone should read this book or a summary of it to be aware of all the serious trouble that the mind can birth in the body. As the author supports, there really is no separation between the mind and body. The title sounds misleadingly gimmicky, but the book is not.

More of a collection of cards than a book. I feel like I’ll be going back to it frequently, as the author advises. On my first read-through, I didn’t have a breakthrough, but I do feel like some seeds were planted. The pages within are prompts for the reader to reflect on.

“To the surprise of any visiting alien, humans blithely educate themselves as if the chief requirement of adulthood were the possession of a set of technical skills, with no acknowledgement of the fact that what mostly runs us into the sands is … our inability to master what we could call the emotional dimensions of our lives.”

An honest, condensed book. I think everyone should read it as early in their life as possible. I’m happy that a lot of the advice doesn’t seem to apply to me, but gives me more tools to understand others.

Enlightening, even though I was already familiar with the concepts. The book presents a set of mental tools and explains their benefits. Armed with those, I feel much more confident in defining and bringing projects to life. This approach makes a lot of sense in theory—I aim to try it for myself in the near future.