The Blog of Marek Cottingham
“But grandma, what do you have this section on your blog for?” “All the better to explain what I’ve read to you. Maybe you’ll even read some too, my dear.”
Score: 10
While I was originally drawn to the book for its discussion of speed reading and memory techniques, I came away with so much more. A great guide to improving how, what and why we learn, and full of immediately actionable points, Limitless is a particularly good choice for someone looking to start reading non-fiction regularly, particularly if you lack the motivation to get through more than a chapter.
Score: 10
In his book on negotiation, Christopher Voss teaches the reader how to communicate clearly and constructively about any contentious subject or situation. He emphasises the need to understand one's counterpart and to communicate our empathy through labeling and summarisation. Furthermore, he discusses the key importance of hidden information to the success of a negotiation and how to uncover it.
Moreover, the skills and techniques presented serve not just to improve one's ability to communicate when the stakes are high, but present a model which can be used to make daily conversation more enjoyable and meaningful, through providing the tools to serve as a better confidant to those we care about.
I've found Voss' advice to be particularly helpful in how it changed my approach to situations where I was frustrated with someone else. By following a negotiation approach which focused on empathising with the other party and forced me to avoid direct expression of my own frustration, it allowed me to learn contextual information which clarified the conversation and relieved my frustration.
Score: 10
In his highly readable and concise book, Cal Newport lays out how job satisfaction originates from the scare resources of autonomy, competence, creative control and meaningful relationships. He posits that a fulfilling career can thus be obtained through patient, focused and strategic skill development in the areas of our strengths, rather than the pursuit of our 'passion'.
He provides examples from various individuals as well as his own graduate career. He discusses how we can gain expertise in a scientific field, by breaking down the work of leaders in our field in order to be able to reconstruct key theories and technologies from fundamental principles.
Score: 10
A gripping discussion of the experiences of the concentration camp. This book is regularly surprising, both in the strength of the desensitisation developed by the prisoners to the suffering of strangers and in the kindness and concern for others that people still develop in such a situation. Frankl also presents the arbitrary luck of those who survived and the common impossibility of making strategic decisions in the face of deception. In discussing the role of meaning Frankl takes a curiously open approach, encouraging us to interpret in any situation that meaning available to find, even if we must find it in the righteous bearing of our unavoidable suffering.
Score: 10
Eric Ries presents a framework for how to run an organisation which aims to innovate, covering strategies and heuristics for obtaining meaningful feedback about the real world performance of a product, conditions to ensure that a product can be rapidly iterated and techniques to build a company culture which enables rapid iteration and honest self-assessment. The book is concise and clearly structured, with examples primarily from Eric Ries's own experience. The information is focused around software products, although the ideas presented so as to be adabtable to other fields.
Score: 8
Drawing on his own and subsequent research in the domain of expert performance, Anders Ericsson presents a paradigm shift in understanding how people learn best and the nature of 'talent'. The book is well structured and well exampled, making for an enjoyable and informative read. Implementing his ideas from the book alone (chapter 6) is fundamentally tricky, so it's worth looking for further domain-specific examples of what others have tried.
Score: 8
Recovering from trauma, particularly from childhood, is a difficult and confusing process. Bessel van der Kolk presents a different paradigm for thinking about trauma, discussing how unprocessed memories can lead to subconscious physical responses and how one can learn to become aware of and take control of this process. The book goes into significant depth, drawing on more recent research and on the author's clinical experience. While at times more detailed than is necessary for the non-clinician reader, it is well worth the read for those interested in the topic, whether for their own personal struggles or to gain perspective on this area of mental illness.