Bonus Must-Haves

I’ve been reading some incredible books lately, and I thought that you might want to do the same over this next week of (at least some) downtime.

• Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe – Nine principles for framing how you think about your life in the face of blindingly rapid change. Some examples: Emergence over Authority, Compasses over Maps, Pull over Push, Risk over Safety, Disobedience over Compliance, Resilience over Strength and so on. The book is jammed full of insights on each topic that I find myself stopping and sitting with for extended periods of time. Sure, there’s some of the same tired examples of Wikipedia and the like, but I’ve learned about things like synthetic biology that I would never have cared about normally. I will be re-reading this over the next week again.
• The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis – I’ve heard Daniel Kahneman’s name probably hundreds of times over the years. His work is referenced in nearly every book on human behavior that’s been written in the last 20 years. This latest book from Michael Lewis is the story of Kahneman and his partner Amos Tversky, how they came together, and how they proceeded to change behavioral psychology forever. As with every other Michael Lewis book, the storytelling is remarkable, and the story itself is simply amazing.

I hope you enjoy these two books as much as I have.