6 Concept Breaker Books: To reflecet during quarintine

During this period of isolation, many people are taking the opportunity to do things they have always wanted but did not give due priority, such as enjoying with their pets, enjoying their children / family, taking courses online and finally many are taking the opportunity to read. As an avid reader and evangelist of the culture of reading, I decided to take the opportunity to recommend some books from my collection to help everyone who is willing to dive into reading during this quarantine.

I decided to choose 6 books that deconstruct concepts that we learned throughout our daily life and often may not be so useful or even harmful. These books, each within its own theme, helps us to reflect, instigate us to think in unusual ways, sharpen our critical sense, our capacity for empathy, provoke our deepest prejudices. They bring an explosion of unusual points of view, but are all necessary for us to grow.

“Disagreement in our thoughts, ideas and values ​​compels us to think, evaluate and criticize. Consistency is the amusement park of numb minds”, Yuval Noah Harari.

Following there's the list with the 6 books I selected to recommend to you, readers, followed by their respective theme and a brief resume. Hope you enjoy!

1) Thinking Fast & Slow — Daniel Kahneman

Theme: How our mind is loaded with biases that control our decisions

Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman is one of the most didactic authors regarding to technical and scientific concepts that I ever read. This book, full of examples and everyday situations, shows us how our own mind deceives us practically all of the time. We think we are aware of every decision we make, every action we take, when in fact much of the inner decision process is uncontrollable. It focuses a lot on the most different types of biases, we all live so loaded with concepts and levers ingrained in our mind (which were formed throughout our lives) that we ended up having very heavy loads in making some decisions. The book helps a lot to do a self-reflection, to start to observe better the way we think and make decisions. It helped me a lot to evolve. Despite this there is a dark side, as it is possible to abstract and use many of the concepts of Kahneman’s research as an intrinsic weapon of persuasion.

2) Powerful — Patty Mccord

Theme: How we manage people & culture within an organization

This book is very powerful — ok, bad pun. The concepts presented by the author and former head of people at Netflix, help to completely deconstruct the way we see the human resources of companies: recruitment, organizational culture, salary, management and so on. Patty proposes an analytical approach to the development of HR, made through small changes and observation of the results with continuous evolution. They came up with very revolutionary concepts, an example of which is that Netflix employees can take vacations at any time and for as long as they want — there are no strict rules. Another example is the way they deal with salaries, encouraging their employees to participate in selection processes at other companies including to know their market value, and then they always cover these values ​​ensuring that they are paying the top of the market. These were just two examples, they bring much deeper provocations throughout the book.

3) The Messy Middle — Scott Belsky

Theme: The hard and little-publicized path of entrepreneurship

Written by the Founder and former CEO of Behance, this book aims to present the long road of an enterprise, between the conception of the idea and the company’s success. We usually find only success stories, but few people do as Scott (and Ben Horowitz perhaps) showing the difficult, depressing, hard side of building a great company. If you are an entrepreneur and you are not in a good time psychologically I do not recommend reading, there are some chapters that are in fact quite pessimistic and can discourage you. Despite this, it is extremely important to absorb these concepts at some point and understand the level of challenges that await anyone when starting a company (mainly technology) — I was fortunate enough to read it before undertaking and it has already helped to align my expectations.

4) Move Fast and Break Things — Jonathan Taplin

Theme: The dark side of the technological monopolies of today

This book was a very grateful surprise, I bought it thinking it was about Facebook’s agile culture (Move Fast, Break Things is a Facebook value written all over the walls), and in fact it is a staunch criticism of today’s digital monopolies. It shows the potential for destruction to other segments caused by companies like Google, Facebook, Spotify and etc. The author brings very profound data and provocations about the negative impacts of these companies, and reinforces the importance of heavier regulations in order to avoid some dangerous futures, where these companies will have more power than the governments of all countries. There are also many criticisms and counterpoints to libertarian thinking, drawn mainly from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, which was fiercely defended by some of the top voices in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel from PayPal. Incredible book to reflect on other perspectives regarding these beloved companies .

5) Outliers —Malcom Gladwell

Theme: How external factors influence people’s success beyond merit

A recommendation from a former Chief of People with whom I worked (by the way one of the best I’ve met), this book is highly recommended for people without the habit of reading. Among the six books recommended in this article, this is the shortest and easiest to read — but make no mistake it is extremely powerful. The author brings several examples and scientific research showing the impact of external factors (which can be called luck) to define the Outliers, people who stood out in our society, from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, to athletes, musicians. It shows another side, which does not exclude individual talent and dedication, but which was extremely important for each Outlier to arrive where it arrived. This book completely deconstructs the simplistic (and ignorant) concept of meritocracy that is often defended today. Great reading for those who don’t have much time and are starting!

6) Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari

Theme: The History of humanity in a mixture of Philosophy, Biology and Purpose

I finished this reading very recently, and it was a huge gift — it is worth every positive review of this highly acclaimed book. Yuval goes through the whole history of humanity broken in 3 main revolutions: Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific. The coolest part of the book is that it deeply questions things like the purpose of humanity — how we follow subjective religions in search of purposes when objectively the real world is much more direct. This book makes provocations around the history of mankind in a mixture with biology and a lot of philosophy. It also shows the destructive potential of Homo Sapiens, but it has many positive sides. It is a mix of optimism and pessimism very well written. In the end, much is also questioned in relation to human and other animal happiness. This book is so complete and complex, with so many layers that it is difficult to even describe it. Read it!

Conclusion

Did you like the recommendations? Share them at will, stimulate the search for knowledge and discussions / reflections from different perspectives are more necessary in these times than ever. If you have recommendations for more books to deconstruct prejudices, please leave them in the comments, I'll love it ;-)