Regardless of what your current struggle in life, these are the things I recommend most often as the technologically inclined need to interact with others, and get things done in life. As a technical person I can get focused on things and how they work. The real magic for moving life forward tends to be found in understanding people and why they work. Of course, the most important person for you to understand… is you.
Power Weekend Six Rules for Success Speech
Arnold Schwarzenegger
2018
Time Investment: 15 minutes
Engineers tend towards a goal oriented life. This perspective has many upsides, but there is a simple concept of molding your life towards your goals you need to embrace. Arnie hammers this point home with gravitas. Like so many other things that fade as you make the transition into an old man, inspiration doesn’t come as often to me as I would like anymore. I was inspired.
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
David Allen
2015
Time investment 10.5 hours
Like everyone, technical people have preferences about what we do with our time. As technical people we are more likely than others to benefit from a system to help us facilitate those preferences. GTD sets out principles you should use in creating your own functional time and task management system. It boils down to task list(s) and calendar(s) and how they work together. I have found it incredibly freeing to stop carrying around my obligations in my head. I offload their collection and prioritization to a system I trust and have tailored to my own needs.
The revised psychology of human misjudgement speech to Harvard
Charlie Munger
1995
Time investment 1 hour
Munger’s writing style is, admittedly, not awesome. However, his life’s collection of cognitive biases and conceptual frameworks is invaluable. In this transcript Charlie briefly reviews many psychological impediments that hold us back in our practical day to day environments. His concept of collecting frameworks and constructs and applying them across disciplines fueled a number of other authors I have benefitted from. Munger is an investor, with a soft spot for the perspective of engineers. So to watch him, a non-psychologist, approach our own psychology is especially useful for the technically minded person who may tend to discount the effects of psychology and one’s own habits of mind. I have concluded his approach to mental models essentially is wisdom. This speech at Harvard is a good, short, and dense introduction and the best summary of his ideas.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Robert B. Cialdini
2014
Time investment 12.5 hours (there is a longer expanded 2021 edition as well)
We are all social animals working continually to influence or manipulate one another. This book will clue you in to the primary seven tactics used on you, and that you are knowingly or not using on others. This book changed my mind about manipulation being a negative activity. We are all manipulating one another all the time. We have to, whether we are a baby crying because we need more milk, or a VP using a compliment to try to help get the best work from a team member. It isn’t inherently bad, it is just what we do as humans and it is best to be aware of it. Not only did it help me spot the tactics, it helped me feel less smarmy once I did understand how I was being manipulated or how I was manipulating others.
Difficult Conversations: How to discuss what matters most
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen, Roger Fisher: The Harvard Negotiation Project
1999 (original)
Time investment 5.5 hours (2023 update is 12 hours)
We all experience conflict with others, and this book outlines what’s going on when we have difficult conversations. The big takeaway for me was in understanding how that agitated feeling that wells up inside was related to others saying things that rubbed up against my vision of myself. Understanding is the first step to better communication when the stakes feel high–at that point we introverts need to stop avoiding what’s most important and communicate.
Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary
Shane Parrish
2023
Time investment: 7 hours
The founder of the Farnam Street blog and The Knowledge Project podcast helps us see where we can overrule our behavioral autopilot to think more clearly and critically in crisis and opportune moments. This short book is dense with tools for overcoming the things that prevent us from making smarter decisions. Parrish deftly groups a host of phenomena that lead us astray into the easy to understand categories of bias: ego, emotional, social conformity, and inertia. Being smart in one area, say technology, can actually lead us to overestimate how knowledgeable we are in other areas which can have disastrous consequences. Parrish helps us justify our well deserved humility.