Top 5 psychological books

Top 5 Pychological books that's best for you

 

1. Thinking, fast and slow

Without a shadow of a doubt, one of my all time favorites.

Trying to go over what this book digs into would take me a whole post in itself, so allow me to just gush: This book is damn awesome, read it!

Seriously though, for behavioral research, there are few books that touch the scope and breadth that Dan Kahneman dives into with this masterpiece

Mr. Kahneman holds a Nobel Prize in economics as well, and this aspect shines through in the book’s many examples.

2. The power of habit (why we do what we do)

This book came highly recommended, and I enjoyed it, but I have some thoughts. While the author does a great job of splitting up habits into appropriate sub-groups, and in showing how habits actually operate in the brain there is one shortcoming: the book doesn’t specifically show you how to change any habits.

Maybe my expectations were set for a different kind of book, but I found the lack of this aspect being addressed as a bit un-fulfilling.

All that said, the book is still a very easy read and a great look on how habits manifest in the brain.

3. Originals: how non-conformists move the world

Whatever you make will be deemed original or cliché in comparison to what currently exists; creation may be about the lonely hours, but a final product is never judged in isolation.

In other words, creative work lives in a dynamic, ever-changing ecosystem.

Getting ahead of the curve, or doing the unexpected, means eschewing what everyone currently expects, which requires knowing what everyone expects. Knowing the metagame — or comparing your work to what exists today — is useful for spotting opportunities for differentiation.

4. The 48 laws of power

This book is a great example of fantastic book marketing: the ideas in this book are sound, and are often backed by real research elsewhere.

What the book does well in it’s marketing is that it creates this ideal that these are some secret laws for the inner Machiavelli in us all (despite that The Prince may have been written as satire).

The funny thing is, some of the ideas are not all that devious, it’s just smart interpersonal relationship & persuasion advice. Despite it’s fantastic marketing and seemingly cynical nature, it’s just really good advice on interacting with people.

5. How to win friends and influence people

With the reach that this book has had in it’s long lifetime, it’s unlikely that you’ve never encountered it before. In order to mix things up a bit, since this book is so well known, I thought I might offer some fantastic insights from one of my favorite Amazon reviews of all time:

—

The advice is largely sound, but I think the reader should keep in mind the context within which this book was written… [it was] intended primarily as a companion book to Dale Carnegie’s classes on how to be a good salesman.

…these techniques work very well in the context of sales and public relations, i.e., in relationships that are not expected to be deep and/or long-lasting.

What I found most interesting was that the last chapter… was to describe those individuals with whom none of Dale Carnegie’s techniques work. In this unpublished chapter, Carnegie wrote that there were some people with whom it was impossible to get along. You either needed to divorce such people, “knock them down,” or sue them in court.

Why is that chapter absent from this book, you ask? Well, Dale Carnegie was in the middle of writing this chapter when he was offered a trip to Europe, and rather than complete this last chapter he decided to take the trip. The uncompleted book was sent off to publishers, and Carnegie shipped off to Europe.

—

Interesting stuff to consider before you dig in.