This book as it’s main point said that you need to understand where the other party is coming from in a negotiation. The secondary points were that negotiation starts with research and building up leverage, along with that you should continually negotiate for information. I really like the lessons that it puts forth and need to remember then when I next am going to be negotiating.
This book has a lot of good insights in how to think strategically, and I’m not doing too many of them. I’ll try to incorporate it more into my life. However, it does put one of the primary goals that it talks about as money and not happiness, so I’ll change that around.
This was a fantastic book, but I’ve heard most of the information in other articles and lecture series that I’ve listened to. There were a few nuggets that I hadn’t heard before. The exercising self control seemed to be an interesting concept, and one that I’ll take up soon. The idea is to sit down at the end of the day and more or less meditate. The purpose of the meditation is to do something that requires a lot of self control, like not thinking of a purple elephant. When that is the purpose of the meditation it makes it quite hard to do anything else but think of a purple elephant. Doing this early in the day can make your self control worse throughout the day, so doing it before bed is one of the best ways of going about it.
This book was pretty good at explaining how to go about learning to interact with other cultures. the most interesting part however was the grouping that the lecturer goes through at the end of the book. I found the outliers the most interesting, like Ireland and Israel. Some of the aspects of the groupings surprised me, like the Nordic countries not wanting to stand out, but still being very individualistic.
This book is another where the topic wasn’t quite what I was expecting. The focus on healthcare made it not quite as useful as it could have been, however it was still very good. I liked the culture building focus that it had, and I know I need to do more of that.
I need to start reading the descriptions before deciding to try some of these books. This one was a lot more fundamentalist and fringe that I was expecting. The ideas espoused in this book were along the lines of ‘find God on your own, and continue to develop a relationship with God.’ I like that it is anti-religious-hierarchy, but the way in which they dismiss the structure for a personal relationship with God isn’t the direction I would go. I lean much more towards the reasoning reflection on what God could be and want with the world, instead of the vague notion of a relationship. There must be some sort of structure to the beliefs.
This is a very interesting take on the question of god and done in a unique way. There is a great story set around aliens making contact, and their beliefs in god. The style of belief seems very strongly correlated to Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. The god here follows a strange belief that I already held, that god can collapses the wave-function; meaning that god chooses the outcome of uncertain events. I had previously held that this was on an event by event basis, but the belief put forward in this book is that it is done on a ‘frame’ by ‘frame’ basis. These ‘frames’ consist of a single instance in the entire universe. It is a different take on why bad things happen to good people in that the god entity can’t make everything good, but can only choose the next frame of the universe to have the best possible outcome.
I hadn’t realized how much of a study this was until I listened to this lecture series. I’m surprised and impressed that so many devout people would get together to discuss and debate their religions and how they evolved over time. The evolution in many cases seems to dismiss the legitimacy of the current incarnation. The changes over time were really cool to listen to, especially when it came to the Americanization of many of the religions.
This had a lot of good points but it was basically how to win friends and influence people in mass. It is good for those who haven’t read other books along these lines, but I’d focus on the other ones first.
It's an Exciting World 