Which book changed how you think?

The eom Expression: Beautiful Chaos

“Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows.

It didn’t just teach me systems theory it permanently changed how I interpret cause and effect. I stopped seeing problems as isolated events and started seeing feedback loops, delays, leverage points, and unintended consequences everywhere: in businesses, politics, personal habits, even relationships. Once you internalize the idea that most outcomes are the result of system structure rather than individual intent, it’s impossible to go back to linear thinking.

A close second would be “Gödel, Escher, Bach” by Douglas Hofstadter. It rewired how I think about self-reference, consciousness, and abstraction. After reading it, I began noticing recursive patterns across math, language, art, and software connections that felt invisible before.

Both books didn’t give me answers; they changed the questions I ask.

Selfish Gene, of course. There is no self. We are but pre-programmed propagation vectors.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Gave me new perspectives about railroad safety and proper behaviors around trains.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Capital in the 21st Century, by Thomas Piketty

The book devolves into policy opinions that have been absolutely torn apart, but the parts about inequality and inheritance shattered some long standing assumptions.

For example, it points out how generational wealth being gone in 3 generations is not for the reasons people extrapolated, the common assumption being that the person that earned it had a lot of discipline, while the subsequent generations experienced complacency and excess, as that was just anecdotes with no data. It replaces them with data that highlights population growth alone influencing this outcome:

In periods of large population growth inheritances were simply diluted to the point of having little efficacy for heirs. In America the free population was 3,100,000 in 1790, while 308,000,000 in 2010. The last census before the book came out. In comparison, France in the old world had 30,000,000 in 1790 and 60,000,000 in 2010. Old world wealth has tended to stay in the same families for centuries. The US is experiencing the same thing amongst some families and as more families get better at estate structures that work for them, a lower birthrate and age of the country, but all of it challenges the common assumption and point of generational wealth.

There are more illuminations around the movement of capital in that book.

Atlas Shrugged. Downvote at will, but I’ll die on this hill. It has some issues, sure, but it should be mandatory reading.

The Art of War by Steven Pressfield. It addresses the fears associated with any new endeavor and how to create systems to dance with the fears.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Le Petit Prince. It is a deceptively simple book I was required to read at school as a child. Each time I revisit it, I understand deeper layers about human nature and life itself.

The Social Construction of Reality[1][2] provided me a method of examining the things that I assumed where obviously true and describes the process by which human ideas are transformed from beliefs into real tangible objects and natural truths.

1. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Penguin Books, 1991.

2. https://amstudugm.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/s...

Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by ET Jaynes was the book that made statistics and probability theory finally make sense to me. Before reading this book, I was already familiar with Bayesian probability, having finished (among other books) The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, but Jaynes took everything to a whole new level. Probability is not an objective measure of likelihood—it is a subjective measure of incomplete information. This seems like a small shift in perspective, but it is much more profound than that, and you have to read the book to understand it.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M Goldratt opened my eyes to process optimization. It is nominally about process optimization in a manufacturing plant, but so many of the lessons can be applied to other domains, such as software development. (And also about life in general, how to think about what matters and what doesn't.) It is a bit dated now; for example The Principles of Product Development Flow offers a much more systematic treatment of the topic. But I think The Goal remains the best intro to process and systems thinking.

The Bible. Through it, I see the connection from the fall of man, the redemption of the cross and the future return of the King to restore all things. I also see connection from wisdom shared 2-3 thousand years ago through the Psalms and Proverbs. This has rewired my understanding of how ancient men and women were pretty awesome and got me over chronological snobbery.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.

The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle

Selfish Gene, Thinking fast and slow, Pale blue dot

Games People Play (1964)

Seeing like a State (1998)

Adaptation and Natural Selection (1957)

The Absent Superpower (2016) (dated now but prescient at the time and noticeably better than the other books by the same author)

Six thinking hats, taught me how to structure my thoughts by wearing multiple hats where hats are perspective

[delayed]

1984 by George Orwell.

Sapiens I wish I’d read it 20 years earlier.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman

It’s a collection of his essays but the one quote that stuck out to me is:

I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize-I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it - those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.

It really got me to get over external validation and doing things for the sake of discovery and learning.

If just one book can rewire your thinking, I feel very sorry for you :)

Virtually every book that survived the test of time has some gem worth finding.

For example the bible is a perfect source of ethical and moral ideas and problems, whether you’re agnostic or not.

Any decent university level course of general physics is a perfect source to learn not only the universe but how would you approach the process itself of learning and exploring it.

The Demon-Haunted World, by Sagan.

I read it during a journey that ended up leading me out of religion. That book showed me so clearly how strange it is to believe in supernatural events.

Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund

Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

Multiple books from both the Torah, and Old and New Testaments of various versions of the Bible

Gomorra by Roberto Saviano

The origins of virtue by Matt Ridley. A good follow up to the selfish gene. Changed my thinking regarding altruism.

Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath, and Influence by Cialdini are classics for a reason. Influence in particular made it shockingly clear how our environment shapes not only our decision process, but our personality.