Henry
David Thoreau once said “a book should contain pure discoveries.” Some
books can do even more and change how you see the world. Here are 10
eye-opening books that might just do that for you. Many of the themes in
these books connect and while reading any one will give you some new
insights, reading all of them may just revolutionize how you see the
world and your place in it.
You don’t see everything you think you see. Through a series of
experiments Chabris and Simons show that, due to attention blindness, we
often fail to see what is right in front of our eyes. The implications
of this are important. We may be missing very useful information and
failing to make connections. Fortunately, there are steps we can take to
improve our intuitive and observational skills.
To solve problems you need to be willing to change how you think. This
entails changing how you see the world in several important ways. Among
these, they discuss the importance of thinking like a child, saying you
don’t know, and learning how incentives work to affect behavior. Their
tips often seem counter intuitive because they are based on seeing
connections among events in non-obvious ways. As you learn to think like
a freak you will learn to see these non-obvious connections everywhere.
Everyone assumes they act rationally most of the time, but as Dan
Ariely points out there are many cases where we do not. We base our
decisions not on rational considerations but irrational ones. Often our
mistakes are simple and predictable. That means knowing more about
them can actually help us create rules and incentives to improve our
lives. We can learn about how we make decisions and how to improve them
by seeing our lives as experiments.
We think what happens to us is the result of our education, skills, and
deliberate decisions. We often see patterns to events where there are
none and we see causes and work when the reality is much more random. It
is difficult to see randomness at work not because it is rare but
because our minds are biased to see order, correlation, and causation.
However the role of chance and randomness in our lives is much greater
than we realize.
We’ve all been taught that we can learn how to live from studying the
past but this lesson is rarely taught in concrete ways, which makes it
difficult to see the truth in this. With concrete examples of ideas from
the past in such areas as love, work, dealing with death, raising
children, and travel it becomes clear that the past is a wealth of
knowledge that we can use to improve our lives.
Major disruption is coming to health care and you will benefit. One of
the biggest changes this will bring is that you will collect and control
your own medical information using your smartphone. Armed with this
information you will have greater control over your health decisions and
greater choice about how to improve your health. Doctors will have to
adapt or patients will choose other options. The doctor will no longer
be in control of your health, you will.
On an individual level it is almost impossible to see trends as they
unfold because we mostly base our ideas about what is going on in the
world on our own limited perception. The places we go and the people we
know serve as our data set. But, since many large social changes start
out as small micro-movements we often miss these trends until they
explode on the scene seeming to come out of nowhere. By examining these
microtrends up close we can learn more about how societal change happens
and how to predict which microtrends will become major social changes.
We can now see the world in vastly new ways because we now have the
ability to collect and analyze massive amounts of data. This data will
show us how seemingly unrelated events are connected, help us determine
whether those connections are mere correlations or cause and effect
relationships, and even allow us to predict future events in ways we’ve
never been able to before.
We have a very linear view of history – especially the history of
inventions. But these inventions rarely arise in a completely deliberate
fashion as the result of intentional effort. As often as not, they
arise as the result of accident or chance connections. Innovations in
one area of life can trigger changes that seem entirely unrelated. The
most ordinary things in our lives such as glass, the clock, and air
conditioning not only arose in surprising ways but led to surprising
changes as well.
Schools teach us that academic subjects are discrete entities with no
relationships between them but this is untrue. In reality, you can pick
any person, place, or event and connect it with virtually any other
because they all exist together and connected on the knowledge web. The
internet reveals this better than ever but it has always been so. Seeing
how the stories of the past relate to each other helps you see that you
too are connected to these same people, places, and events. You are
part of the knowledge web too. Creativity and problem solving both
involve making connections. This takes good examples to draw upon,
practice, and an awareness of our cognitive biases and how to address
them. Each of these books provides insights and examples to help improve
your ability to make connections. The more connections you can make,
the more knowledge you have. And, as James Burke once pointed out, when a
big enough part of your knowledge changes how you see the world also
changes.
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