by Aseem Gupta | Mar 30, 2019 | Book Summaries and Analysis
When Randy Pausch delivered his now-famous Carnegie Mellon lecture on September 18, 2007, he was not participating in the usual academic exercise of pretending to give a final address. Pausch, a computer science professor with metastatic pancreatic cancer, had already...
by Aseem Gupta | Mar 28, 2019 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck became famous partly because its title sounds like an instruction to stop caring. That interpretation is catchy, but it is almost the opposite of what the 2016 book argues. Manson does not recommend emotional...
by Aseem Gupta | Mar 26, 2019 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You is usually summarized in five words: “Don’t follow your passion.” That captures the provocation that made the book famous, but it does not capture the book itself. Newport’s real subject is not whether passion is good or...
by Aseem Gupta | Mar 22, 2019 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull is often remembered as a simple inspirational fable about refusing to conform and pursuing what you love. That description captures its most visible idea, but it misses the larger movement of the book. Jonathan begins as an...
by Aseem Gupta | Mar 19, 2019 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Most books about better thinking promise a method. Rolf Dobelli’s The Art of Thinking Clearly offers something more unusual: a catalog of the ways the mind repeatedly goes wrong. Across 99 short chapters, Dobelli moves from survivorship bias and sunk costs to...
