Psychology Archives - Page 2 of 2

Best Summary + PDF: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is a classic that needs little introduction. It’s one of the best-selling books of all time and a major developer of the “self-help” book genre. Many principles written in How to Win Friends and Influence People have been repackaged and articulated in different forms.

Published 80 years ago, it contains universal principles of interacting with other people that ring true even today. Since its publishing, much has changed about the way we access information, work, and communicate – but little has changed about human nature and what we crave from other people.

In this How to Win Friends and Influence People book summary, learn:

How to be a great conversationalist while saying barely anything
What people crave from others as much as food or water
Why you fish with worms, not cheesecake, and what this means for people interaction
How to influence people to see your way of thinking, without arousing their anger

Best Summary + PDF: Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker

If you’re like me, you sometimes try to get by with just 5 to 7 hours of sleep (or even less). You hope that you’ll make it up in the extra hours of productivity, or by catching up on sleep on the weekend. There are plenty of excuses for being sleep deprived – a big deadline coming up, too much work, too binge-worthy of a TV show, social events you can’t miss out on.

The book Why We Sleep argues this is totally short-sighted. More people are chronically sleep-deprived than they realize, and the punishments for this are severe – reduced productivity and happiness, and increased risk of a panel of diseases. Except for very rare genetic freaks (<1% of population), the standard sleep you should be getting every night is 8 hours, without fail.

This helpful New York Times bestseller covers how sleep happens, its major benefits, its frightening downsides when deprived, and the best ways to get better sleep.

In this book summary of Why We Sleep, learn:

Why your insane dreams are incredibly helpful for your problem-solving
The 5 major reasons you’re getting less sleep than you should – and how to fix it
How being a night owl is determined by genetics – and why night owls are punished by society
How chronic sleep deprivation destroys your body, from weight gain and heart disease to Alzheimer’s
A very rare inherited disease that causes incurable insomnia, then certain death, within 10 months
How a cocaine-addicted surgeon started the insanely sleep-depriving medical residency program

Best Summary + PDF: 12 Rules for Life, by Jordan Peterson

12 Rules for Life is a collection of life principles that, if followed, are meant to improve your life. It reached the #1 spot on Amazon’s bestsellers list, and clearly it resonates with a lot of people.

Its author (Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and U Toronto professor) argues that modern secularism and reliance on science has left a void in answers to important existential questions: What is the point of living? Why do bad things happen to good people? What am I supposed to do to make myself happier? Why does life have so much suffering?

Without a clear guiding structure, you might feel directionless. You may be prone to nihilism (“there’s no point to anything”), existential angst, and misery. You may blame the world for being unfair to you, while spending your time on things you know are counterproductive. You may feel stuck and unable to change.

12 Rules for Life is Jordan Peterson’s attempt to fill the void. It’s his prescription for how people should behave and how they should deal with the vagaries of life. It covers why you should stop telling lies to others and yourself, why you should stop doing things you know are bad for you, and how to pursue what is truly meaningful for you. If individuals can take charge of their lives, then society can cure its ills.

The general points in 12 Rules for Life are undoubtedly things you’ve heard vaguely in the past, even cliched – but for some reason, the way he articulates his prescriptions carries considerable power and gravity. It’ll remind you of what you didn’t know you knew. As comments a typically rational, data-driven writer: “I actually acted as a slightly better person during the week or so I read Jordan Peterson’s book…It certainly wasn’t because of anything new or non-cliched in his writing. But God help me, for some reason the cliches worked.”

In this 12 Rules for Life book summary, learn:

What good posture has to do with your social status
Why it doesn’t make sense to compare yourself with anyone else
The one tactic to become an effective listener and get people to tell you whatever’s on their mind
More explanations on the classic stereotype of women talking about their problems with men wanting to fix them too quickly
How to stop blaming the world for your misfortunes and take responsibility
A solution to nihilism

Book Summary: Why We Get Sick (Evolutionary Medicine)

Why DO we get sick? Why hasn’t natural selection, over millions of years, prevented us from getting cancer, heart disease, and depression?

Our bodies seem at times to be faulty designs, prone to error and calamity. Diseases seem like mere accidents of evolution (like the appendix). Or perhaps natural selection just isn’t powerful enough to get rid of some diseases?

The science of evolutionary medicine says this thinking is totally, utterly wrong. Instead, our bodies have evolved over millions of years as a set of compromises, largely in pursuit of reproductive fitness. Frankly put, whatever gets you to survive and have kids is going to persist in the gene pool, even if it causes you lots of disease and pain in adult life.

Why We Get Sick is one of the most insightful and profound books on disease I’ve ever read (including all of my medical school training). After reading this summary, I don’t think you’ll look at disease – and humans in general – the same way again.

In this Why We Get Sick summary, you’ll learn:

Why humans haven’t evolved to live for 200 years, and why we don’t regrow limbs
The evolutionary purpose of depression
Why females evolved to bear children, and why this has led to the classic male fear of commitment and all sorts of confusing sexual behaviors (it takes a few logical steps, but trust me)
How the fact that we evolved in small tribes in the Stone Age, combined with today’s mass media, may increase depression
Why we’ve evolved to dislike the sound of baby crying

Best Book Summary + PDF: Grit, by Angela Duckworth

Do you have problems finishing things? Do new ideas distract you from previous ones? Do you get derailed by setbacks more often than you would like?

Then you could use more grit. In Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance book, Angela Duckworth shows how grit – the combination of passion and perseverance – distinguishes high achievers, and why talent isn’t as important as most people think.

If you’re not as gritty as you like, don’t fret – this book teaches the 4 major components of grit, and how to develop grit in your kids and teammates.

Best Summary + PDF: Hooked by Nir Eyal

Modern technology has us addicted to its use. While you might be aware that you’re addicted to your phone or favorite apps, you might not know exactly how you got addicted. It just happened without your noticing it.

Before you knew it, you were automatically checking your phone / email / Facebook / Snapchat / Netflix / Reddit / etc without even realizing you were doing it, then realizing later, “well that was pointless – why in the world did I just do that?”

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal provides a wonderfully useful framework on how tech products build lasting habits in their users. If you’re a product designer, you’ll build more persuasive products that change user behavior. If you’re a user, you’ll better understand how tech products manipulate your behavior, giving you a better chance of kicking bad habits.

In this Hooked book summary, learn:

The most effective triggers to get users to voluntarily return to your product
What all humans want to do and feel, at the end of the day
How to stop your product from getting stale by providing infinite variability
When monetary incentives are far less effective than social validation
How to get users to give you permission to trigger their return in the future

Best Summary + PDF: Give and Take, by Adam Grant

Are you a giver, a matcher, or a taker?

People fit into one of three reciprocity styles. Givers like to give more than they get, paying attention to what others need. Takers like to get more than they give, seeing the world as a competitive place and primarily looking out for themselves. And matchers balance and give on a quid pro quo basis, willing to exchange favors but careful about not being exploited.

Of these 3 styles, which do you think tends to be the most successful? When surveyed, most people believe the takers and matchers come out on top. Givers just seem too altruistic to push themselves ahead.

In Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant argues that givers are actually the most successful of the 3 types. Givers build larger, more supportive networks; they inspire the most creativity from their colleagues; and they achieve the most successful negotiations. Givers find ways to grow the pie and take their share of it.

And yet givers also risk becoming spineless doormats. You may know of a pushover who gives in to every demand, at cost to his or her own well-being. There are strong strategies to protect against this.

In this Give and Take summary, you’ll learn why givers are so successful, why takers are punished by society for bad behavior, and how givers can avoid pitfalls that drag them down.

Tim Ferriss’s 17 Questions to Solve Your Life Problems

Feeling stuck in life? Asking extreme questions gets you thinking about your life from a different direction. You might find the solution was obvious all along.

Tim Ferriss’s 17 questions are a great start to questioning what you can improve about your life. These question come from his best-selling book Tools of Titans. I humbly share Tim Ferriss’s questions below, adding my own interpretations and thinking exercises to help you apply them.

25 Cognitive Biases that Ruin Your Life, Explained

Want to practice better decision making?

Unfortunately, your natural brain’s pretty dumb and easily tricked. To save energy and make faster decisions, it relies on cognitive heuristics to make fast judgments.

In prehistoric days when we had to avoid getting devoured by lions, these fast heuristics worked pretty well. Now that life is more complex, the decisions you need to make are more complex, and your cognitive biases trick you into making bad decisions.

These 25 cognitive biases come from “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment,” a talk by Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway.

By learning these biases, you’ll guard yourself against people trying to exploit you. Even better, you’ll guard against your worst enemy: your own brain.