Category: Book summaries
Welcome to the collection of book summaries. I love to read, and I read a lot. My goal is to read around 50 – 55 books per year (or one book per week), especially on various psychology, personal development, business and IT topics.
To get the most out of my favorite books or books that genuinely changed my life, I prepare book summaries, mind maps and sometimes even flashcards or other learning aids. That enables me to refresh knowledge chunks in regular intervals, which is one of the best learning practices.
I am happy to share all the materials with you, in hopes that they will positively influence your life too. Book summaries are not that short, but they are prepared in a very structured and detailed way, so you can really get a grasp on what the books are all about.
The book summaries serve two main purposes – to understand what a book is all about and encourage you to read it, and as a way to refresh your knowledge once you’ve read the book.
The four most important life areas for the majority of people are love, health, wealth and general happiness. If any of these life pillars collapse, the quality of life dramatically decreases. Out of these four, love is probably the trickiest one, since many factors are beyond your influence. But here’s the thing. You can’t force somebody to fall in love with you, but you can definitely improve your odds. The book to go to if you want to improve your odds as a man dating women is Models: Attract Women Through Honesty written by Mark Manson. Here you can read the summary of the book.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) happens when you can't get rid of disturbing thoughts about one shocking event that happened to you. Complex PTSD is on the other hand caused by long-term emotional trauma in interpersonal relationships, and is most often the result of stressful upbringing. Complex PTSD can be caused by overly critical parents (who only want to do good), emotionally distant parents (who just lost their job, for example) and all the way to cruel verbal and physical abuse (parents breaking their children to feel better). You can find many depressed parents, aggressive parents, workaholic parents, and that all leads to them destroying their children’s lives. Consequently, being in such a toxic environment, a child never learns that relationships in life can be comforting and enriching. The book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving written by Pete Walker is the number one book to go to if you …
Much like I am innovating with applying agile and lean techniques in general to personal life, Tim Clark innovated how to use the Business Model Canvas for planing a complex career decisions and maximizing your personal value creation. He came up with a brilliant idea for a canvas named Business Model You. The canvas already helped thousands of people to clarify what they want out of their career. The idea of Business Model You is to help you with complex thinking when you want to make changes in your career. It helps you reinvent your career path by finding the best way for you as an individual to support yourself financially based on your talents, goals, needs, desires and environment.
Dishonesty – the truth about lies is a really well-directed documentary that explores how and why people lie, why we become dishonest and why we start acting immorally. The documentary narrator with the central role in the movie is Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He is also a bestselling author and extraordinary interpreter of complex topics in a simple way. Understanding why people often don’t behave in a rational way and think as long-term as it would make sense, and why people sometimes become narrow-minded, vindictive and dishonest can help you explain many situations I bet you found yourself in – with your own behavior and in interaction with others. In this blog post you can learn the main takeaways from the Dishonesty documentary.
