Category: Self-Help / Career

Rating: 8.0/10. How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner Book about project management: what are the differences between projects that are completed on time (like the Empire State Building), and those that experience years of delays and go…

Rating: 7.6/10. Book for people interested in U.S. immigration, covering a wide variety of the most common and many of the less common visas for both immigrants and non-immigrants. It provides a good understanding of the differences between categories and how the immigration system works as a whole. Most of the chapters are relatively independent…

Rating: 7.3/10. The Nomadic Developer: Surviving and Thriving in the World of Technology Consulting by Aaron Erickson Erickson Book about technology consulting firms, how their business works, and how to succeed in one. Essentially, consulting companies sell the hours of their consultants to clients. The sales team tries to add work to the “backlog” to…

Rating: 7.9/10. Book about the principles of management, written by the former CEO of Intel. It begins with a toy example production process of a restaurant preparing breakfast meals. The first essential principle is to organize the process around the limiting step, which is the step that takes the most time. For instance, in the…

Rating: 7.9/10. First-Time Home Buyer: The Complete Playbook to Avoiding Rookie Mistakes by Scott Trench and Mindy Jensen Guide to buying real estate, with a focus towards first time home buyers and assumes you’re in the United States (although most of the advice applies to Canada too). The first thing to know is that your…

Rating: 7.8/10. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef A lot of psychological research has shown how we’re prone to cognitive biases, although less has been written about how to overcome them. Many of these biases result from deciding on some opinion and holding onto it, even…

Rating: 8.0/10. Jordan Peterson’s sequel to 12 Rules for Life, written after a lengthy break due to medical issues. The content is similar to his first book and there is a lot of overlap with the similar messages of being truthful to yourself and others, taking responsibility for your own life, confronting problems when they…

Rating: 8.2/10. Book by an economics professor on how to succeed in academia and become a professor. Faculty positions are extremely competitive, and the nature of job depends on what tier of university you end up, and whether you’re in tenure track. Top-tier research (R1) universities have professors doing research and only a bit of…

Rating: 6.5/10. Habits are actions that seem insignificant in the moment, but whose effects compound so that the long-term effect is significant. If you become 1% better every day, you will be very good after a year. The habit loop is subconscious and consists of four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward, thus you should…

Rating: 7.0/10. I got this book in an effort to improve my public speaking. It provides a bunch of tips on giving talks; the majority of it was either too vague to be useful or very obvious, but some of it was interesting, like the chapters on visuals and stage setup. The problem is this…